


write to me (and escape)

by rameseas



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fans & Fandom, Alternate Universe - Online Friendship, Dramedy, Fandom Allusions & Cliches & References, Gen, Long-Distance Friendship, Long-Distance Relationship, M/M, Metafiction, Multi, Teenage Shenanigans, Verisimilitude, semi-Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2016-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-10 21:49:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 39,379
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5602309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rameseas/pseuds/rameseas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are at least <i>thirteen</i> people out in the world who happened to have been named – on purpose or otherwise – after science fiction’s most famous galaxy trekkers, and James Tiberius Kirk of Riverside, Iowa considers himself at least semi-intimately close with all of them. Color him mighty thankful for that.</p><p>( <i>a <b>star trek</b> fandom au</i> )<br/>( please read author's notes )</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 000 AVATAR

**Author's Note:**

> buckle up, friends - we've got a long road ahead of us.
> 
> so this au is old enough to be a toddler. it first came to me at the ass end of 2013, festered in the back of my mind through 2014 and '15, and then suddenly reemerged with a vengeance somewhat recently, after i'd done all the growing i needed to be able to actually write this thing and finally figure out exactly how i wanted to do it.
> 
> i can honestly say that this is my absolute favorite thing i've ever come up with. most of my aus and fics, i try to be really deep and complex and artistic about - this one too, to an extent - but it by its nature is going to be self-indulgent in a lot of ways. the goal is to not let that turn into blatant fantasy fulfillment.
> 
> but! now that my nice little introduction is out of the way, here are the important notes that i quietly beg you to consider before reading. it isn't my intention to deter anyone from diving into this - i just really need everyone to be aware of what they're in for so as to prevent any disappointment or unfulfilled expectations.
> 
> \- initially going into this au, i fully intended for kirk/spock to be the central relationship. after years and literally over a hundred pages worth of skype conversations with formative parties, the focus shifted wholeheartedly onto jim and gary. i deeply believe this change _benefits_ instead of takes away from the story, and i've poured oodles of thought and feeling and love into their relationship and the way it's going to turn out. it is unspeakably important to me.  
>  there will be kirk/spock and it will be an important aspect of this story! i don't feel bad about spoiling that! but if you came here expecting everything to be built around jim and spock, i'm sad to say you're probably going to be let down. 
> 
> \- gary is the deuteragonist of this story, and i will say up front that he is _not a good person_. i cannot stress this enough. without spoiling too much right off the bat, he's probably one of the most explicitly and wholeheartedly morally ambiguous - not _evil_ , but definitely not _good_ \- characters i will ever write, and he will say and do a lot of things that i in no way endorse. i'm giving a head's up now both so that no one is unprepared for how offensive he'll be and so that it's clear that in writing him the way i do - with a very specific, extremely abrasive sense of humor in mind - i'm not saying it's okay to go and emulate him, because it probably isn't and you probably shouldn't.
> 
> \- somewhat related to the note above: jim and gary's relationship isn't something i plan on or intend to romanticize, either. just keep that in mind.
> 
> \- there will _most likely_ be sexual activity between adolescents depicted (probably not too explicitly) at some point. i didn't want to check the underage box because i didn't want to give the impression that there would be adult/child relations in this story, and also because the teenage hanky panky isn't really going to be a huge focus, nor will it be intended to be titillating. it's probably going to come up later as a plot point, though.
> 
> \- a good chunk of the characters here are people of color, as am i. some of the opinions and statements expressed by them will reflect a point of view informed by being a non-white person. just throwing that out there.
> 
> \- in terms of the side pairings i didn't think were prominent enough to tag (just because i didn't want to fill those tags with mostly irrelevant stuff): mccoy/chapel and uhura/gaila are the ones you're going to see peppered throughout the fic.
> 
> \- this story is probably going to run the gamut from ridiculously silly to exceptionally serious and will hopefully tackle a whole host of real-life issues and situations in the most casual and realistic way possible. mood whiplash and emotional rollercoasters are a given.
> 
> \- this is maybe not so essential to your appreciation of this fic, but: there are going to be so many things taken from my own life, feelings, and experiences that i probably won't even be consciously aware of some of them. i'm pouring everything i got into this thing. i hope you enjoy it.
> 
> fic title comes from _escape (the pina colada song)_ by rupert holmes.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In another life – one lightyears more familiar, mundane, and exceedingly ordinary – their first meeting went something like this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> here, have a prologue.

James Tiberius Kirk and Leonard Horatio McCoy met in the year 2255 at the ages of twenty-two and twenty-eight, respectively, on the United Federation of Planets’ seventh starbase _or_ on an overcrowded recruit shuttle, depending on what timeline you happen to be looking at. In the following decades, they invariably chased after one another across the endless expanse of space – exploring strange new worlds, seeking out new life and civilizations, and boldly going where no man had gone before.

All of this is true, of course, in a universe that exists beyond a silver screen and in syndicated reruns of the world’s most iconic work of science fiction in history. In another life – one lightyears more familiar, mundane, and exceedingly _ordinary_ – their first meeting went something like this:

At 6:43 on an early Tuesday evening, after awakening from one of the post-school, pre-dinner naps that had become customary for him after he’d entered middle school and found sixty-five percent of his energy completely consumed by his academic life, LiveJournal user **kaptaiinkirk** found a message awaiting him in his inbox, sent to him about an hour earlier by the user **heartofathens** – then just a floating emblem for Starfleet Medical on the royal blue background of their avatar.

> _Hey your ‘Wake Up’ fic is really good. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a reincarnation fic before in the ST fandom, not even when I spent like eight and a half years digging through all the old ass archives. Where’d you get the idea for that?_

The captain – around a year into his self-imposed social isolation and always in some state of quiet agony for the lack of proper attention and affection he’d been afforded for the past twelve months – was so thrilled in that moment that he damn near tumbled right off of his bed and onto the floor in a heap of giddy excitement and brilliant surprise. Instead of giving in to his usual ridiculousness, however, he put his fingers to the keys and tapped out a reply with the kind of frantic speed normally reserved for high-energy chases in _Bond_ films and running to class before the tardy bell rang.

>   _omg wow thank you so much!!! thats so nice of you x3  
>  __i dont really know tbh – i guess i just woke up one day with the idea in my head and started writing it, haha_

Then, for the next fifteen minutes, it was systematically raiding **heartofathens** ’ _Trek_ -filled journal and gleaning from it as much information about them as possible. Their name was _Leo_ , according to their profile page, and judging from their thirty most recent entries, their interests included but were not limited to: Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Supernatural, and the sort of sci-fi and paranormal television the captain himself had been ensnared and entangled in for as long as he could remember, thanks to his parents’ informal policy of raising him and his older brother on a strong mixture of tough love, good advice, and all manner of geek material.

> _You got a wicked writing style kid. Real surprising for someone as young as you are. (Can’t believe you’re actually eleven years old, not that I’m too much older…)  
>  _ _If you ever need a beta or anything… don’t be a stranger._

And they were both so young then, and their acquaintances with both the Internet and each other were in their infant stages, and the captain had a stomach that roiled softly with social anxiety, at least an hour and a half’s worth of homework to do, and a mother that had been calling him downstairs to ‘ _get some damn dinner_ ’ in an increasingly stern tone for the past twenty minutes, but –

 _But_.

There was an indefinable _something_ that made friendship – even of the temporary sort – with Leo seem like an irresistibly good idea at the time. Maybe it was the captain’s own sharp, ever-present loneliness, the kind that came with fresh loss and growing up too quickly. Maybe it was the steep high that came with being recognized and complimented. Maybe God was real and They were working mysteriously, then.

Whatever it was, it kept the captain typing.

> _i’ll be sure to let you know!  
>  _ _oh! and feel free to call me jim, btw ;)_

* * *

I almost forgot to mention the most important and hilarious part of this situation, though I suppose you’ve probably already puzzled it out due to its obviousness and its peculiarity. I’ll go ahead and mention it anyway.

The captain and his soon-to-be friend Leo were, and _are_ , in fact, the aforementioned James Tiberius Kirk and Leonard Horatio McCoy. Of course, they didn’t exactly know these things about each other at the time of their first meeting – exchanging things like full names and Social Security Numbers within minutes or even days of knowing each other has nearly _never_ been the way of online friendships, after all – but being named after two of the most famous characters in science fiction history lends itself to both a fair degree of pride _and_ some safety when it comes to disclosing one’s identity and, one could imagine, can be exceptionally difficult to keep hidden.

They’d been talking, ficcing, and intermittently roleplaying across the galaxies of LiveJournal, Gmail, and Chatango for a month or so when, on a Saturday night at the beginning of October 2008, the Big Revelation occurred.

> **kaptaiinkirk (10/11/08 10:59:46 PM):** would you beleive me if i told you i actually was captain kirk
> 
> **heartofathens (10/11/08 11:00:27 PM):** Honestly? Maybe so
> 
> **kaptaiinkirk (10/11/08 11:00:59 pm):** my parents were really into star trek when they were younger  
>  **kaptaiinkirk (10/11/08 11:01:07 pm):** my dad’s last name was kirk, so… they decided to name me james tiberius as some kind of tribute to gene roddenberry or the fandom gods or something haha xD

There had been a pregnant pause after the captain had sent that off into the void, long enough to have him gnawing at a thumbnail and hopping out of his desk chair to anxiously root around for the old bag of Twizzlers he knew had been lying around in his room, hidden like buried treasure and a temporary antidote for his nervous oral fixation. He knew his jokes sucked major monkey ass, but he’d gotten comfortable enough with Leo at that point that he wasn’t so hesitant to roll them out anymore. Maybe he’d miscalculated the degree of comfort between them, though, like the overfamiliar idiot he was –

Then, his well-loved dinosaur of a computer _popped_ , and he was back across the room and in his chair like a shot, thumbing his glasses up against the bridge of his nose to read Leo’s reply.

> **heartofathens (10/11/08 11:03:02 pm):** My parents named me after a Star Trek character too…

It took no time at all for the captain to catch his friend’s meaning. Suddenly, his face looked a whole lot like his grandmother’s old Christmas tree – the one they’d decorated with white lights and tinsel at the end of every year since he’d first emerged into this world as Captain Kirk’s decidedly unlucky, overly mundane reincarnation.

> **kaptaiinkirk (10/11/08 11:03:11 pm):** YOUR NAME IS LEONARD MCCOY?!?!??  
>  **kaptaiinkirk (10/11/08 11:03:20 pm):** OH MY GODDDD LEO!!!! YOUR E LENOARD HORATI O MCCOYH IM SCREAM ING
> 
> **heartofathens (10/11/08 11:03:29 pm):** I sure as hell hope you aren’t  
>  **heartofathens (10/11/08 11:03:32 pm):** Do you know what time it is?!

The captain wasn’t _actually_ screaming, of course. It wouldn’t be lying to say that the sound that was coming out of him then was somewhere between a quiet yell and _Ave Maria_ , however, and reasonably closer to the latter than it was the former.

> **kaptaiinkirk (10/11/08 11:04:00 pm):** ohhhh my god  
>  **kaptaiinkirk (10/11/08 11:04:06 pm):** does this mean that i can call you bones?

It became glaringly obvious that their friendship had been written in the stars when Leo replied, in his typically gruff, hysterically _Bones_ -like fashion,

> **heartofathens (10/11/08 11:04:12 pm):** Knock yourself out, Jim


	2. 001 FRIDAY NIGHT ON PLANET TUMBLR

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The night of Friday, February 8th, 2013 could be any Friday night on Planet Tumblr.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this first actual chapter here is going to be kind of a stand-out in that not every chapter is going to play out in the same way or even in a similar way. because it's basically an introduction to most of the characters and their dynamic with each other, it's dancing to a different beat than the rest of the story will.
> 
> also - as much as i like the idea of every chapter being roughly the same length, they're probably going to vary a little or a lot. some of them will be hella drabbly, some of them will be more narrative and kind of long.
> 
> god, this story is going to be so schizophrenic.

The night of Friday, February 8th, 2013 could be any Friday night on Planet Tumblr. Between the gratuitous stream of selfies, pretty photosets of the year’s latest blockbuster, long-awaited updates of fanfiction sagas, and the general buffoonery that is exceptionally typical for our resident gang of geeks and fanatics, the beginnings of each weekend very nearly blur together in their invariable similarity to one another.

On this particular Friday, however, the night progresses like this.

* * *

> **7:32 PM CST**

With a thrill of exhilaration that damn near makes him tremble, Tumblr user _rameseas_ – otherwise known as _Jim Kirk_ , currently just over a month from his sixteenth anniversary and the day he often imagines himself ultimately and magically transforming into the person he’s been trying to get to for the past five years on – hits the cerulean blue _Post_ button and broadcasts to his almost twelve-hundred followers that the _Star Trek_ university fic he’s been laboring over for nearly half a year has _finally_ been updated. Four exclamation point- _updated_.

And then he sits back. Breathes a little. Takes a quick swig of orange Fanta. Tries to battle down the weird-funny-amazing excited fluttering that always surges up inside him when he hits a milestone like this.

Because it’s hard, sometimes, to watch notes start to appear and see his work – his ten-tentacled literary _baby_ – proliferated in an almost virus-like fashion so soon after he’s unleashed it out into the wild, Jim switches windows and finds Bones, who’s been waiting for him to become available since he got home from school and threw himself headfirst into finishing the monster of the chapter that’s been holding him captive for _months_ ; he’s a slow writer, poor thing, but only because of his insatiable taste for grandiosity in the yarns he spins and the fact that he has the attention span of a caffeine-addicted gnat, nine times out of ten.

> **[2/8/2013 7:32:48 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** OKAY IM DONE

After a rapid, half-frantic search for his cell – punctuated with whispered, “Where’s my _fucking_ phone?” – Jim turns the device over where it lies quite obviously beside him on his mattress. Eleven notes already. He flips it right back over and waits for Bones’ reply. 

> **[2/8/2013 7:33:10 PM] Bones:** Took you long enough  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:33:17 PM] Bones:** I’ll take a look at it as soon as I tear myself away from this tomfoolery I’m currently being subjected to

Jim rolls his eyes a little despite Bones not actually being able to see, briefly and half-thoughtlessly fingering the hairs that touch his forehead before putting his digits back to his keyboard.

> **[2/8/2013 7:33:26 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** you do know nobody’s forcing you to binge watch murder she wrote
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:33:49 PM] Bones:** I’M forcing me to binge watch Murder She Wrote  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:33:57 PM] Bones:** You know I have a medical condition
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:34:10 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** the one that forces you to maintain a constant level of anger at everything at all times so as to not spontaneously lose all will to live?  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:34:13 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** of course i know about that ;)
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:34:32 PM] Bones:** Alright sassy ass

Cheeking off to Bones almost always allays whatever strange anxiety Jim might be wrangling with at any given time – this particular occasion not excluded – and so with a lighter heart and the beginnings of a smirk playing on his lips, Jim switches windows again and hits his dashboard, middle finger resting comfortably against the _page down_ key at the upper right corner of his keyboard.

This early in the evening, the dashboard is usually a borderline _joy_ to behold. Tonight is no different – the very first thing he’s greeted with once the page loads up is an old _Adventure Time_ fanart dredged up from several months ago and recirculated by _randaid_ – or, as Jim knows her, _Jan_.

Jim met Jan three years ago, shortly after he’d first created his Tumblr account and when he was saddled with the embarrassing, _way_ too long URL of _acruelandknavishsprite_ , because a good Shakespeare quote is always the way when you’re twelve going on thirteen and mildly obsessed with showcasing your own intellectual superiority. The second half of 2010 didn’t see only _her_ entering his life in a flurry of excited fawning over _Supernatural_ AUs and the release of _Iron Man 2_ earlier that year, though – there was also Chapel, who shared Bones’ lifelong love for fantasy literature and proved to be just as gentle and kindhearted as her _Trek_ namesake; M’Benga, a television buff with a penchant for constant sarcasm and being just as unimpressed as possible with pretty much _everything_ ; and T’Pring, who was, to be entirely frank, _difficult_ as all get out but also ridiculously smart for a thirteen year-old in a way that made Jim uncomfortable, insecure, bitter, and just this shy of intrigued.

As for the artist of the aforementioned fanart, it’s one of Jim’s absolute _favorite_ people in this world – _45tro_ , otherwise known as _Chekov_ and the fifth person Jim has met in his life to be coincidentally named after one of his beloved space voyagers. That’s right.

There are at least _thirteen_ people out in the world who happened to have been named – on purpose or otherwise – after science fiction’s most famous galaxy trekkers, and Jim considers himself at least semi-intimately close with all of them. Color him mighty thankful for that, and perhaps shades of bewilderment and delight as well.

Stupidly warm and fuzzy on the inside of his skin, Jim makes it his business to speedily reblog Chekov’s art – mindful to tag the piece with all manner of exclamatory praise and general ridiculousness – then continues on down his dash, liking posts left and right with his typical quiet fervor. A _TOS_ gifset. A David Bowie music post he’ll probably reblog later. A text post that has him giggling like a fool for a good minute and a half. Some _Harry Potter_ meta _vulcanfleur_ (read: T’Pring) has written up that he’s not quite in the mood to read at the moment, but probably will be eventually.

He stops short at the appearance of a filter-laden bathroom selfie uploaded by _sweetpleiades_ – otherwise known as Gaila, the rainbow-haired Cuban-American subject of one of Jim’s fiercest platonic crushes and the sixth person to join his strange menagerie of _Star Trek_ namesakes. In it, Gaila flashes a jewelry-encrusted peace sign at the mirror/camera and grins her iconic, typically heart-stopping sunshine grin, flanked on her right by Uhura – menagerie member number three, shiny-haired and fresh-faced and smiling something aloof and almost dangerous – and Spock – menagerie member number two, clad in a dark, crisp button-down and a stoic face that only barely belies the slightest traces of amusement.

> **sweetpleiades** :
>
>> luv calling these babes my besties <3

> _tagged as_ : #visage #nyuhura #vulcanologie #literally my faves of all time

Approximately one-thousand miles away in the mystical land of New York City is where Gaila, Uhura, Spock, and T’Pring go to school, have lunch and dinner, maintain eye contact, and otherwise _exist_ together on a daily or near-daily basis. To say that that fact doesn’t drive Jim a little crazy with yearning and perverse jealousy – only out of a deep-seated want to share in that physical togetherness, too – would be to verge _hard_ on untruthful.

Even so, Jim likes and reblogs Gaila’s group selfie with a soft, happy little smile tugging at his lips, letting himself linger, vaguely dazzled, on it – their faces, their clothes, their visibly apparent affection for one another – for about thirteen moments longer than he actually has to before finally moving on with his scroll-session.

After four more posts – all Technicolor hipster photographs, all summarily liked or reblogged – a notification at the bottom right corner of his dashboard catches Jim’s attention and very nearly induces in him a small, excitement-induced aneurysm –

> **_sulukun_ ** _reblogged your photo **45tro** : _ _✧_ _˖_ _° bubbline doodles for randaid!!_ _✧_ _˖_ _°_

Sulu – menagerie member number four and the self-proclaimed Knuckles to Jim’s Sonic – occupies a very special place in Jim’s heart. Of course, they _all_ do in their own ways – ever since they all somehow magneted themselves to Jim through LiveJournal and Tumblr over the course of three verging on four years, Jim has found himself in about seven different types of love with all of them, the kinds that have him up on Skype all night and bemoaning his pathetic and lonely existence in Bumfuck, Nowhere (otherwise known as Riverside, Iowa) even more than he already would, considering the ongoing joke that has been his life – but there’s something about Sulu that makes it immediately and almost painfully imperative that Jim raise his voice and kick and shout and yell enthusiastically about pretty much everything to him just about every time he sees that he’s online or available. Hence the mad dash to his blog and into his askbox.

> **rameseas** asked:  
>  _GET THE FUCK ON SKYPE_

Jim’s ask isn’t ever actually answered, of course, but sure enough, within minutes Skype is blooping at him that **_Hikaru Sulu_** _is online_ and the group chat they all share – previously only occupied by Jim and Bones for the better part of the afternoon – is suddenly inhabited by three instead of two.

> **[2/8/2013 7:43:46 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** who’s being sassy?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:43:57 PM] Bones:** Jim  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:44:00 PM] Bones:** Who else?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:44:06 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** ;)))
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:44:17 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** you know in terms of general sassiness, i actually think spock is the sassiest one of all of us  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:44:24 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** probably even more than me, and i’m like, the crown prince of sarcasm
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:44:45 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** bones is pretty fuckin sassy too tho  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:50:53 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** when he burns.... he BURNS
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:51:12 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** omg can we do a sassiness hierarchy?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:51:24 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** YES GOD

For the next five minutes, then, it’s Jim and Sulu systematically ranking each member of their Internet clique from greatest to least in terms of their general sauciness while Bones mostly sits back – obviously still distracted by his infernal television – and occasionally drops in to offer his two cents. Spock, of course, unanimously reigns as king in this department, but after him is where things start getting tricky – Jim is convinced that Bones, Sulu, and then himself immediately follow with Uhura, Chekov, M’Benga, and T’Pring trailing behind, while Sulu is certain that they would have inverted places on the scale and that T’Pring would rank much higher than she does on Jim’s pecking order.

> **[2/8/2013 7:54:30 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** yea but tpring is actually like… bluntly honest and kind of mean instead of sassy  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:54:35 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** i feel like you have to be kind of funny to be sassy
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:55:40 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** touche
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:55:45 PM] Bones:** Spock is blunt and can be mean as shit too, though
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:55:53 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** AT LEAST HE MAKES YOU LAUGH INSTEAD OF Y’KNOW  
>  **[2/8/2013 7:55:57 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** CRY HYSTERICALLY AT YOUR OWN INADEQUACY

At least they can all agree that Chapel is the most angelic of them all. There isn’t a sassy bone in her body –

> **[2/8/2013 7:56:48 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** except for BONES’ bone if you know what i mean ;)
> 
> **[2/8/2013 7:57:01 PM] Bones:** I’m fucking disowning you

Grinning bright and amused in his own rare, somewhat startling way, Jim watches the note count on his update climb to forty-three, slurps up the remaining dredges of his orange soda, and indulges in a hearty, self-directed laugh. Oh, the cleverness of him.

* * *

> **9:07 PM CST**

It is just after the hour when the monster appears.

Jim is hopping between Chekov’s recently-begun livestream and a mostly playful argument with Bones and Sulu about the state of the _Marvel Cinematic Universe_ and whether or not _DC_ will ever truly measure up or attempt a similar moviemaking experiment – a discussion in which he is wholeheartedly enthusiastic and optimistic about _Marvel_ , Bones is somewhat grudgingly gunning for _DC_ , and Sulu is primarily indifferent – when he is abruptly notified by both Skype and his dashboard that the scourge is upon them all, and its name is Gary.

> **youngsupervillain** :
>
>> _good evening Hebrews and shebrews_
> 
> _tagged as_ : #its clobberin time

Gary – the illegitimate and miraculously conceived lovechild of Tyler Durden and Diogenes the Cynic, Jim’s sure – is a rarity among Jim’s troupe of _Trek_ namesakes in several aspects. For one thing, Jim met him in real life before ever finding him on the Internet – something he can say for no other member of his makeshift bridge crew. For another, Gary’s Internet presence is markedly different from the rest of theirs. Where most all of them run around in fandom circles – politely writing fic, producing fanart, making commentary, and generally just geeking out in every which direction – Gary’s modus operandi is, well… never so clearly cut.

A simple visit to _youngsupervillain.tumblr.com_ will surely offer the clearest possible picture of the point I’m trying to make. As soon as the page loads, you’re invariably bombarded with some kind of terrible autoplayed earworm – one week it might be a KidzBop cover of Billboard’s latest number one hit, the next it just as well may be the noisiest, most shock-inducing screamo song you’ve ever had the horror of being subjected to – and if you aren’t well and truly appalled by that alone, the iconic early 2000s mock-MySpace layout – lime green Times New Roman over a checkered black-and-white background and an accidentally-on-purpose counterintuitive interface that’s enough to incite rage in even the most levelheaded of web surfers – is almost certain to seal the deal.

Then there is the actual content to consider. A veritable flood of absurd, brazenly flippant, or otherwise vaguely controversial text posts make up about fifty-percent of the blog’s subject matter, the other half being made up of whatever random interests Gary might have at the time and his typically insouciant or just outright unkind responses to the small avalanche of messages he gets on a weekly basis. Last week, Jim recalls seeing Gary answer an anonymous request to tag his gore posts with the entire script of _Brokeback Mountain_. A week before that, he was instructing someone in no uncertain terms to ‘ _fuck the fuck off_ ’ simply for asking about his day.

Jim is pretty sure most of his followers – his friend group included – follow him out of a sense of ambivalent amusement or, in some of their cases, borderline hatred. He considers himself no exception to this.

> **[2/8/2013 9:07:13 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** oh god guys  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:07:16 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** guess who’s online
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:07:25 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** ?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:07:30 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** fire lord gary of course
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:07:38 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** IT’S ALIVE  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:07:45 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** god you know it would make his dick so hard if he knew you called him the fire lord
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:07:49 PM] Bones:** I s2g if he starts back on that shit about me and Chris I’ll fly up to Iowa just to shove my foot up his ass

The incident Bones happens to be referring to occurred the previous Friday, and it all started with something that, by all accounts, shouldn’t have garnered nearly as much attention or ire as it did. After a post in which Gary facetiously lambasted long-distance relationships got somehow tied to our Internet clique’s resident old married couple, what basically constituted as a virtual deathmatch took place. Names were called, fingers were pointed, a considerable amount yelling was done by all, and the night ended with a distressed Chapel, a quite pissed-off Bones, and Jim checking his phone to find that Gary had texted him, just as smug and uncaring as could be, “ _dance monkeys dance_ ”.

> **[2/8/2013 9:08:05 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** you know he just wants to get a rise out of you  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:08:11 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** and by getting mad you’re basically just giving him exactly what he wants
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:08:44 PM] Bones:** Still deserves foot in the ass in my opinion
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:09:00 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** that’s the exact kind of thinking he gets off on tho  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:09:09 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** not saying its right or anything i just think wasting your energy getting pissed hurts you more than it does him
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:09:18 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** ^^^^^

Jim temporarily breaks off from the conversation to play Solitaire on his phone for a bit and go back to watching Chekov doodle _Star Trek_ fauns to Nouvelle Vague and Squirrel Nut Zippers, lying halfway on his side with his laptop pushed out of his lap and wedged awkwardly against the wall directly adjacent to his bed. His mother and older brother have made fun of his ability to type/web surf/computer in general in just about every position imaginable for years, but he likes to think of it as proof of his ever-growing power. ‘ _Soon I’ll be invincible_ ,’ he thinks –

– and then very nearly drops his phone directly on his keyboard when Skype tells him, cooing softly, that **_Spock Novak_** _is online_. Thankfully, he’s just quick enough to stop mid-fumble and not make a fool of himself in front of absolutely nobody.

Much like Sulu, Spock – easily the most quality out of all of them, with his four-digit follower count and simple-and-clean blog theme and knack for producing the best _everything_ (meta, fanfiction, edits) Jim has probably ever seen – incites in Jim the kind of all-consuming excitement and immediate need to talk/yell/exist at him every chance he gets, probably even more than Sulu does. Jim’s sure he must set some kind of world record switching back over to Skype and shooting him a private message.

> **[2/8/2013 9:11:07 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** HEY HI HELLO THERE FRIEND
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:11:38 PM] Spock Novak:** Hello, Jim. How was your day?

When Jim met Spock, it was a culmination of all the things he only vaguely knew he wanted and never imagined that he needed. Meeting Bones was it and of itself probably the best thing that ever happened to him online – their enduring friendship, five years running, is a testament to that – but something different happened with Spock, something hard to describe and even harder to personally fathom.

With them, it was like gears clicking into place, like breathing, like watching a mirror. The fact that they’d literally been born a mere four days apart and were both coincidentally named after a dyad so complementary and so unambiguously in love has only ever made their friendship seem more and more like kismet.

> **[2/8/2013 9:12:16 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** ehhh… school was pretty gross as usual and i almost ended up going home early because i was “”sick””, but i actually wrote this afternoon and updated rocket men and felt productive so??? i think today has been a winner  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:12:23 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** what about you?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:12:47 PM] Spock Novak:** Today was passable. Not altogether too eventful.  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:13:05 PM] Spock Novak:** I’m sorry for getting online so late. Sybok wanted to treat me to dinner and that turned into a movie and then somehow into grocery shopping.
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:13:25 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** pfff don’t even sweat it  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:13:29 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** i’m just glad i have you now c:

They were twelve when they met each other through the thick web of LiveJournal, and both undergoing some degree of major life transformation at the time. The transition from elementary to middle school had been anything but easy on socially awkward, racially ambiguous Spock, and Jim had all but become a recluse as a result of his father’s sudden and intensely traumatic death only two years earlier, and while it would have been easy – expected, even – for these situations to pull the two of them apart from each other, for some reason – just as things had gone with Jim and Bones – it didn’t.

They were the first people they ever told in great detail about their emotional cliffs and mountains, about the things that made them lose sleep – sometimes good, sometimes bad. They were the first people who ever cured – even if only for finite periods of time – the unique and sometimes suffocating aloneness they always felt in everything they did and everything they were. They were the first people to actually have _seen_ each other – clearly and nonjudgmentally and undeniably affectionately – the way they’d wanted to be seen for as long as they could remember.

Loneliness, shared interests, and the right timing can be a powerful cocktail when it comes to forming a lasting long-distance friendship.

> **[2/8/2013 9:13:59 PM] Spock Novak:** You said you updated ‘rocket men’? I’ll have to read it.
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:14:14 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** !!!!  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:14:21 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** aaaAAAHHH please do and tell me what you think  
>  **[2/8/2013 9:14:30 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** ive been wanting you to read so much of this part since i started writing it
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:14:57 PM] Spock Novak:** Would you like me to commentate as I go?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 9:15:08 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** if you don’t mind :)

For three verging on four years, Spock has been Jim’s best friend, secret keeper, artistic muse, and just about every word or phrase you could come up with that would mean _very-much loved one_. Sometimes, it’s unbelievable how lucky Jim feels to have him.

When Jim glances back at Tumblr – more out of habit than an explicitly thought out desire to do so – he is immediately greeted with the following post:

> **Anonymous** asked:  
>  _STOP calling your dog ugly all dogs are beautiful!!_
> 
> **youngsupervillain** answered:  
>  _fuck peta_

And then, after some scrolling:

> **youngsupervillain** :
>
>> _my dog is so ugly every time he looks in my eyes I think about Death_

He’s sorely tempted to screenshot his earlier conversation with Bones and Sulu – the _Fire Lord_ part of it, at least – and send it to Gary, knowing how great a kick he’d probably out of it. Instead, he continues his game of hopscotch between Chekov’s stream, his dashboard, and Skype, starts a new game of Solitaire, and happily watches the night crawl onwards.

* * *

> **11:40 PM CST**

It is almost midnight for Jim Kirk, and the witching hour has begun.

This is nothing unusual. Just about every Friday night sees things happening this way – at around the stroke of twelve, suddenly _everyone_ is online and _everything_ is happening all at once, both on Skype and on Tumblr.

On the latter, a war is being waged over a single post, made at 11:29 PM –

> **youngsupervillain** :
>
>> _gay marriage is the worst possible thing that could happen to this world lms if you agree_

– and while Jim has a deep and somewhat exhausted cognizance of the fact that the post is intended only to piss people off instead of start any kind of serious social discourse, he watches – equal parts exasperated and reluctantly entertained – as people from all corners of Tumblr flock to tear Gary apart, only to be figuratively swatted away by all manner of sarcastic quips and irrelevant reaction images.

> **Anonymous** asked:  
>  _Love is great. No matter the set of genitals it includes love is the most important and pure thing this world has to offer and its people like you that feed into the hate and ugliness of this world. Homosexuals aren't the problem, its this kind of harmful thinking that's the real problem. Also you think gay marriage is so terrible, but you specify he/him pronouns in your description, which either means you're trans, gender neutral, or nonbinary. It's quite comical if I'm honest._
> 
> **youngsupervillain** answered:  
>  _idk what you’re talking about I just like making people mad_

“Aaaand that’s all, folks,” Jim says at his computer screen.

Meanwhile, on Skype, there’s a party going on in the aforementioned group chat. Jim isn’t so sure what it’s about – it’s very likely _no one_ does – but every five seconds or so, Skype will chirp at him and he will switch windows and find a rough average of nine new messages and that the subject of the conversation has changed for probably the eight-thousandth time.

> **[2/8/2013 11:40:29 PM] Nyota Uhura:** oh my god, please tell me you’ve seen the skit where he’s a blind guy who’s part of the KKK.  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:40:35 PM] Nyota Uhura:** OR NO the one with the tupac song and tupac is literally predicting shit beyond the grave.  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:40:39 PM] Nyota Uhura:** i’m telling you, i literally CRY laughing every single time i watch that one.
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:40:45 PM] Bones:** That one is a fucking CLASSIC
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:40:49 PM]** **♥** **gaila** **♥** **:** the part where he’s like “stop hittin the table”  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:40:51 PM]** **♥** **gaila** **♥** **:** ACTUAL TEARS
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:40:55 PM] SCOTTY:** could someone PLEASE hook us ignorant peons up with a link?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:40:59 PM] Hikaru Sulu:** seconded
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:41:07 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** thirded

Scotty is one of the few actual adults within their clique, several years older than the rest of them and functional enough to live independently without accidentally starving to death or spending all of his money on movie tickets and _X-Files_ merchandise. There’s always been something slightly strange, maybe even a little inappropriate, about the fact that he – always an adult in all the time Jim has known him – has made his Internet family a gang of pubescent teenagers, but he’s never been anything but hilarious, compassionate, and almost childishly whimsical in equal measure, so the age difference has rarely if ever felt acute to any of them.

> **[2/8/2013 11:41:21 PM] Nyota Uhura:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDdbn0eTDpA
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:44:49 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** IM ACTUALLY SCREAMING
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:44:51 PM] SCOTTY:** i literally laughed so loud my cat jumped like ten feet in the fuckin air i’m so serious
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:45:09 PM] Bones:** See?  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:45:11 PM] Bones:** A classic

In the midst of Jim’s noisy, laughter-induced seizure, a sharp, strident lightning bolt of a voice goes ringing through the house from downstairs – “ _Hey!_ Keep that shit down, Jim, it’s too fuckin’ late for that!” – and Jim’s mood isn’t _immediately_ ruined by the interjection – he’s much too amused by the hilarity he’s just witnessed – but as soon as he actually registers the way his heart hammers in his chest and his breath catches at the unbearable harshness of that tone, it’s a matter of slowly settling into the suddenly-there pit in the middle of his mattress and feeling himself almost imperceptibly shrink, the kind of rapid recoiling you can’t really see from the outside.

Spock has been silent for the past twenty minutes or so. Jim switches over to their private chat.

> **[2/8/2013 11:45:38 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** hey
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:45:59 PM] Spock Novak:** Hello.
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:46:07 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** you okay? you got quiet
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:46:25 PM] Spock Novak:** Sorry - I’ve been distracted.
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:46:34 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** that’s okay  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:46:38 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** just checking, y’know

Jim idly worries the inside of his lip, considering the stone in the throat of his fingers. He knows intimately well that Spock is _Spock_ – emotionally remote, blunt under almost all circumstances, and, as Bones said, quite capable of being ‘ _mean as shit_ ’ – knows that the nature of their friendship stipulates that he shouldn’t feel nervous about doing this, about _talking_ to him, but there’s been an invisible sign on the back of his head with ‘ _BURDEN_ ’ written on it in huge red letters for the past five years, and try as he might, he can’t quite get it to detach itself.

Still – he brings his knees up, scoots his laptop flush against his stomach, forces himself to press his fingertips back to the keys.

> **[2/8/2013 11:47:02 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** can i talk to you about something?  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:47:09 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** if you’re busy don’t worry about it
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:47:30 PM] Spock Novak:** Of course you can.  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:47:37 PM] Spock Novak:** I’m not exactly ‘busy’ - my attention is simply divided. You’re not bothering me, though.

Jim nervously grinds his molars together. Ignores the relentless stream of notifications going off from the group chat. Tells himself get the fuck over himself again.

> **[2/8/2013 11:47:52 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** okay so  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:48:05 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** this has been a thing for like two months but i thought if i just acted like it wasnt and didnt say anything about it to anyone it would eventually just… magically not be a thing anymore? becuase that’s totally reasonable  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:48:07 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** but uh  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:48:13 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** my mom and frank are getting married and i’m kind of terrified?? so haha  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:48:16 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** yeah....

Frank – deputy police chief of the Riverside Police Department and reigning president of the _Leaders in Self-Righteousness_ club – entered Jim’s life with all the pomp and circumstance of a goddamn superhero about a year and a half ago, sweeping his grief-stricken mother off of her steel-booted feet and taking it upon himself to rescue the poor, unfortunate Kirk family from all of their troubles and pains with his own personal brand of lite authoritarianism and domineering guidance. Last Christmas, he finally proposed to Mother Kirk, and it might be a little childish, but seven months of steadily increasing verbal and emotional abuse dealt by his hand and listening to the man and his mother engage in vocal title fights about once every week has made Jim none too pleased about his mom’s responding ‘ _yes_ ’.

In less than half a year, Frank will be Jim’s brand new daddy and a permanent fixture in the next two years of his life if everything goes according to plan. It’s cute thoughts like that that keep him up at night.

> **[2/8/2013 11:48:42 PM] Spock Novak:** This is an unpleasant development…
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:49:00 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** yeah no kidding
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:49:08 PM] Spock Novak:** I’m very sorry, Jim.  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:49:13 PM] Spock Novak:** Is there anything I can do?
> 
> **[2/8/2013 11:49:24 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** you can kidnap me and take me away from this horrible piece of shit town

Feeling deeply pathetic, Jim is quick to soften the _everything_ of that statement with something much less desperate.

> **[2/8/2013 11:49:34 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** no but really you just talking and listening to me helps a lot

Then shoves the heel of his hand _hard_ against his forehead and _sighs_.

> **[2/8/2013 11:49:58 PM] Spock Novak:** Good.  
>  **[2/8/2013 11:50:07 PM] Spock Novak:** Would you like me tell you about the documentary I’m watching? It’s about Hatshepsut.

And despite his half-assed resolve to stay miserable, Jim can’t help it – he smiles so _big_ , bright enough to glow in the relative darkness of his room and seeping warmth from the inside. Sometimes, Spock’s nuance-free, almost clinical chatting style is enough to trick him into thinking that connections between them are thin and spindly like old thread, but then he’ll say something that reveals with such startling clarity that he _knows_ Jim so _much_ – knows his age-old obsession with Ancient Egypt and learning and simply being spoken to – and Jim will feel like the happiest fool that ever lived.

> **[2/8/2013 11:50:15 PM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** please :)

Just before Spock starts going into his spiel on Jim’s second-favorite pharaoh, Jim checks in on his dashboard again, quietly curious about how the battle has progressed since he looked away.

Unsurprisingly, he manages to be both vexed and tickled by what he finds, and he makes this apparent to the various action figures sitting on the shelf across the room with a sharp snort of laughter.

> **youngsupervillain** :
>
>> _I wanna get paid for being a bully like Chelsea Handler and Judas_

Again, he considers contacting Gary for a split-second – it would be exceptionally easy to start a conversation with him on Skype or just pick up his phone and text him – but he doesn’t, chooses instead to turn onto his side with his laptop wedged in the lazy _U_ of his body and take in all that Spock has to tell him about the great woman king of Egypt.

* * *

> **1:35 AM CST**

The night is quiet, and Jim believes he has reached the delirium stage of fatigue.

The delirium stage is usually sandwiched between _moderate-to-severe sleepiness_ and _absolutely wired exhaustion_ , and with it comes a vague, floating sensation and a tendency to find everything at least a little hysterical. Wild, thoughtless giggling and pressing your hands to your face to keep it from falling the fuck off _hysterical_.

Jim suspects that he is in this stage because he is currently on the verge of _tears_ laughing at the _Sims 3_ game he’s playing – in which his lovingly crafted Captain Kirk Sim happens to be the unluckiest little virtual motherfucker ever created, probably, just accidentally burned his and Sim-Spock’s two-story craftsman to the ground in his futile attempt to make breakfast and fell asleep in an unoccupied house across the street – and because the sound of his own amusement is so funny to him that he can only laugh _harder_.

Almost everyone else has disappeared by this point – Uhura, Sulu, and Gaila having taken the high road and gone to bed like the normal human beings they aren’t, Scotty having vanished to God knows where, Bones having retreated to another group chat with Chapel and M’Benga to discuss their completely make believe medical occupations or whatever, and Chekov having gone mysteriously silent about two hours ago after he stopped streaming, as he sometimes does. Consequently, only Spock is left for Jim to fling his Sims-and-hysteria-related retardation at.

> **[2/9/2013 1:35:02 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** omy god have i told you about how fuckign creepy my spock sim is in this game  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:35:11 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** its really so bad but so hilarious at the same time
> 
> **[2/9/2013 1:35:30 AM] Spock Novak:** In what way is he creepy?
> 
> **[2/9/2013 1:35:57 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** well for starters this one time he literally stood RIGHT BY the bed and watched kirk sleep through the whole night  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:03 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** the next night kirk threw a party and spock just stood at the top of the stairs the whole time until all the guests left  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:03 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** and then proceeded to YELL AT KIRK
> 
> **[2/9/2013 1:35:57 AM] Spock Novak:** Oh dear.
> 
> **[2/9/2013 1:36:04 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** oh dear is RIGHT  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:10 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** like two sim days ago they had a pool party  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:16 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** and spock kept challenging kirk to a hold breath contest after everyone left  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:19 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** but kirk was getting tired and so was spock  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:22 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** so i had spock get out  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:26 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** and then he stood RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM POOL LADDER  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:36:29 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** SO KIRK COULDNT GET OUT
> 
> **[2/9/2013 1:36:40 AM] Spock Novak:** It sounds like you have a virtual sociopath on your hands.

Jim stifles a borderline _manic_ laugh in the inside of his elbow.

> **[2/9/2013 1:36:48 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** you may be onto somehting lmao

To prove his point, Jim spends the next ten minutes regaling Spock with his _Sims 3_ adventures in domestic abuse – the time Sim Spock took Sim Kirk on vacation and then left him at the hotel to go home and ‘ _cook_ ’ in the oven, the time Sim Kirk went on a date with a friend and came home to find Sim Spock just sitting in the living room in complete darkness, the time Sim Spock made food of ‘ _horrifying_ ’ quality and kept trying to call Sim Kirk to the meal, and last but not least, the time Sim Spock slapped the shit out of Sim Kirk almost immediately after he’d spoken with Sim Sulu and Jim had actually rolled off of his bed and onto the floor and died a little, that’s how disturbed and tickled he was.

He’s gone back to his game and to gently nudging Sim Kirk and his psychopathic roommate towards a slow-burning romance – a flirty interaction here, a deep conversation there – when the mood changes, mostly imperceptibly at first.

> **[2/9/2013 1:52:53 AM] Spock Novak:** I just got another message.
> 
> **[2/9/2013 1:53:03 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** oh??
> 
> **[2/9/2013 1:54:09 AM] Spock Novak:** “i don’t understand why you and tpring are still even dating when you’re obviously hella out of her league…”

Jim is caught up short at that. It isn’t an altogether too uncommon occurrence for Internet famous Spock to get vaguely harassing anonymous messages – many of which he shares with Jim so they can have a good laugh over them before they’re promptly deleted – but the ones concerning the beautiful, brilliant girl he’s been with for eighteen months and adored with such quiet, unmistakably adolescent intensity are the ones that always put Jim’s stomach in his throat, even if only momentarily.

He doesn’t really like to think about why.

> **[2/9/2013 1:54:30 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** the fact that you get shit like this in your ask so much is so weird and kind of funny to me omg  
>  **[2/9/2013 1:54:34 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** like what makes people think you actually care honestly

When Spock doesn’t reply within twenty seconds, something begins to gnaw softly at the inside of Jim’s abdomen. When twenty seconds turns into a full minute, that gnawing turns slightly more frantic. When a full minute turns into five, Jim is convinced he said the wrong thing, was too tactless, missed some subtle nuance Spock trusted him to pick up on and refer to –

> **[2/9/2013 2:00:00 AM] Spock Novak:** T’Pring and I broke up today.

– and it’s as if he’s been sucker-punched in the face.

Jim’s feelings about T’Pring have never not been _weird_ , for lack of a better term. The first he encountered of her was her very public evisceration of an ignorant – but most likely innocently so – blogger who couldn’t wrap their minds around the merits of feminism, and while Jim agreed with every word she said, he couldn’t help but be put off by the clinical aggression with which she said it. When she started dating his best friend, his feelings were complicated even further for reasons he’s never fully confronted or truly understood, but despite all this, he’s firmly believed from the beginning that they probably belong together in the way perfect high school sweethearts do – both of them gifted, both of them fearless, both of them the ridiculous kind of stunning Jim all but _knows_ is the will of the elusive puberty gods.

He’d never imagined, with the way they’ve always fit together like complementary puzzle pieces, that they’d _ever_ fall apart. In his head, it was a two-story Victorian brownstone and a kid serving supermodel looks straight out the womb and eleven doctorates between them and a long and lovely fifty years of marriage in their future – not _this_.

> **[2/9/2013 2:00:10 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** oh my god

It dawns on him that Spock has more than likely been sitting on this fact for _hours_.

> **[2/9/2013 2:00:15 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** oh my GOD

Confusion knots in the pit of his stomach. His hand has been on his face since he first read and then reread Spock’s abrupt declaration, shocked and still and pressing into his forehead; he tears it away from the skin to type with all ten fingers.

> **[2/9/2013 2:00:25 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** what happened?
> 
> **[2/9/2013 2:00:30 AM] Spock Novak:** She told me she doesn’t feel the same way about me that she used to and that she’s been spending time with someone else that she now wants to date in my place.  
>  **[2/9/2013 2:00:37 AM] Spock Novak:** I don’t know how Nyota wasn’t aware of it, but apparently no one else knew about it.  
>  **[2/9/2013 2:00:40 AM] Spock Novak:** She still wants to be friends.

For about a minute and a half, all Jim can do is cup his hand over his mouth so that his jaw doesn’t completely unhinge and go falling directly into his lap. He’d always thought T’Pring was kind of cold, but this…

… this makes him want to _scream_.

> **[2/9/2013 2:02:46 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** i’m  
>  **[2/9/2013 2:02:50 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** i’m so sorry
> 
> **[2/9/2013 2:02:55 AM] Spock Novak:** There’s no need for that.

Jim very nearly gnashes his teeth together, but he’s not surprised by Spock’s response.

> **[2/9/2013 2:03:02 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** i know that spock i just  
>  **[2/9/2013 2:03:07 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** that’s…. really shitty and it hurts me that that happened to you and i really just  
>  **[2/9/2013 2:03:10 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** i think you deserve nothing but the best
> 
> **[2/9/2013 2:03:29 AM] Spock Novak:** Thank you for the sentiment.

Jim may sigh a little, then – suddenly tired in a very different way than he was before – but he’s known for a long time that this is how Spock reacts to emotional trauma and sympathy, knows that even though his typing style gives away nothing but unsettling terseness, he’s more than likely in a lot of pain at the moment, the kind he’s never been very good at articulating.

Again, it registers to Jim that Spock has probably been holding this in from the moment he got online. Frantic, almost angry helplessness tangles inside of his chest; he rubs his hands over his face and swallows around all the _feeling_ lodged in his throat.

> **[2/9/2013 2:03:44 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** what can i do?  
>  **[2/9/2013 2:03:50 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** even if its something super little i want to do something   
>  **[2/9/2013 2:03:52 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** anything that might help
> 
> **[2/9/2013 2:04:06 AM] Spock Novak:** Are you at liberty to talk on a call?

Jim smiles something slightly sad at his monitor.

> **[2/9/2013 2:04:09 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** of course  
>  **[2/9/2013 2:04:14 AM] CAPTAIN KIRK:** just let me save and close my game real quick

They talk about nothing for the next hour and a half, and Jim tries not to let the miles between them hurt him so much.

* * *

> **3:47 AM CST**

When Jim heads downstairs, the house is as cold and silent as it always is in the wee hours of February mornings.

Spock was the last of his friends to go offline and presumably to bed about ten minutes ago, and so, with no one left to occupy his attention, Jim has taken it upon himself to cart the dirty dishes that have been accumulating in his room for the past two days downstairs and into the kitchen, and also maybe grab a glass of water or something. As far as he knows, he’s the only person awake for miles.

While carefully rinsing and putting his various plates and cups in the dishwasher in as quiet a manner as possible – he doesn’t want to go and accidentally rouse his mom or Frank up and hear about what an inconsiderate brat he is for the millionth time – he mentally considers what trivial shit he wants to watch until he can’t keep his eyes open anymore when he gets back upstairs. Classic _Thundercats_ is always good in a pinch, but a part of him is calling to his strange guilty pleasure, bred after years of idly watching it at night when he’d crawl into his mother’s bed and try to go to sleep – _Sex and the City_ –

He damn near jumps out of his skin and drops his mosaic plate directly on the floor when his phone vibrates where he left it on the counter, the sound harsh and jarring against the cedar.

> **gary**      now  
>  you awake fag???

Jim shivers, pulls the sleeves of his hoodie over his wrists, and gives a slow, wordless shake of the head.

> **1-(515):** _yeah_

He’s back upstairs, under the covers, and queuing up eleven episodes of _Sex and the City_ to play him to sleep when his phone buzzes once more.

> **gary**      now  
>  play draw something with me

Jim has been awake since five-thirty in the morning – being a teenage insomniac that attends school at seven AM will do that to you – and his eyeballs feel like they’re about three seconds from shriveling up and falling right out of his head he’s so tired, but he still rolls onto his stomach opens up his _Draw Something_ app, ready to kick Gary’s politically incorrect ass from here to Timbuktu with his wicked finger painting skills.

Consumed as he is with exhaustion and distracted as he is by _everything_ , he has a niggling urge to go back to writing, open up a fresh Word document and start in on a new chapter not even a full twenty-four hours after he’s poured his soul into the last one. Tonight was hilarious and emotional and overwhelming – that does a lot to make his fingers dance and set his mind ablaze.

But that’s just typical for a Friday. Same shit, different night, as they say.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please for the love of all that is good and hilarious, wikipedia diogenes the cynic if you don't already know who he is. everything will make more sense if you do, plus you'll probably get a laugh out of it.
> 
> also - the university fic jim is writing is a not-so-veiled reference to one that i started writing several years ago and am now in the process of reworking. stay tuned if you're interested.
> 
> comments, critiques, and questions are heavily encouraged and heartily welcomed.
> 
> \- gabi


	3. 002 GENIUS OF FOLLY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The way they met, Jim doesn’t think he’ll ever forget.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i wrote this whole chapter in four days because i'm hypomanic and in love with this au. as a result, this chapter is all over the fucking place, and i'm too wound up to decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing.
> 
> halfway through writing this, i realized that i forgot to mention the obvious in my notes for the last chapter: there will inevitably be references to other fandoms/media peppered throughout this thing - some or a lot of which you may or may not be familiar with? - but whether or not you actually know what these such pieces of media are about is probably going to be irrelevant and inessential to your understanding/appreciation of the story. 
> 
> also! socially awkward, moderately overwhelmed jim is socially awkward and moderately overwhelmed for a reason. i'm not really big on reading fic anymore, but what experience i do have with it tells me that my particular characterization of jim in this 'verse is kind of-sort of-super out of the ordinary when it comes to aos (or just trek fic in general). i assure you that pretty much every choice i make with this fic is a conscious and well thought-out one and heavily urge you to just trust me and stick with me on this one - missing pieces are going to fall into place eventually.
> 
> chapter title is a reference to the song _genius of love_ by the tom tom club (which i would definitely listen to while reading) and to the ancient roman concept of a _genius_ as a sort of semi-divine guardian spirit of a person, place, institution, or idea.

The way they met, Jim doesn’t think he’ll ever forget.

Mind you, their first meeting wasn’t an actual _meeting_ so much as a chance encounter in which they exchanged nothing but a couple of strange looks and an unspoken sentiment of wonder, maybe, or something much closer to perplexity than anything else.

With Riverside being the pitiful, almost unbearably boring shithole it is, there’s a marked absence of stores, shopping centers, or anything excepting an old Goodwill for its residents to fulfill their distinctly American drive for consumerism. Consequently, every year when birthdays and gift-giving holidays roll around, the Kirks embark on fifteen-mile pilgrimages to Iowa City to engage in capitalistic rituals at its various shopping malls and apparel stores.

It was last year – two and a half weeks before Christmas and right after Jim and his mom had just spent three-fourths of Mother Kirk’s mechanic salary on presents galore at the Sycamore Mall – that Jim first saw him. He was loading as many shopping bags as he could handle into the backseat of their old pickup when a group of horseplaying teenagers caught his eye, all of them congregated several yards away in a mostly unoccupied section of the parking lot.

The boy was dark-haired and olive-toned – hard not to zero in on when surrounded by your typical gaggle of blond, blue-eyed Midwestern white kids – and he was pulling off the most ridiculous and impossible thing Jim had ever seen a person do on a skateboard: stork-standing on one end of the board and spinning around and around on it like some kind of punk rock ballet dancer – making so many revolutions it made Jim kind of dizzy just watching him – then executing a flawless kickflip, instantly garnering a small symphony of impressed ‘ _woah!_ ’s and shocked ‘ _oh my god!_ ’s from his fellow teenagers when he did.

He was coming off of the trick, coasting aimlessly on his board with a kind of fluid ease that made Jim wonder for a moment whether or not he’d come out of the _womb_ skating, when they suddenly locked eyes across the parking lot. Jim, feeling awkward at having been caught staring, was prepared to look away immediately, but Skater Boy held his gaze, got a weird look on his face – something smacking vaguely of recognition – and then, in the most bizarre instance of wordless communication Jim had probably ever experienced up until that point, _bared his teeth_ and _crossed his eyes_ at him before laughing inaudibly and turning away, skating back towards his friends without giving Jim a second glance.

Jim had stared at the back of his head and his patched leather jacket for maybe a full thirty seconds, trying to decide whether what had just happened had _really_ just happened, before his mom noticed what a dweeb he was being – “You gonna keep standing there?” she said from the driver’s seat, ready and waiting to make the drive back home, “‘Cause if you wanna freeze to death, that’s your choice, baby.” – and he, decidedly _against_ hypothermia, bade himself to climb into the truck cab and shut the door behind him. As his mother turned out of their space and zipped out of the parking lot at her typical breakneck driving speed, Jim contorted himself around the best he could to get one last good look at the olive-skinned Bam Margera and his gang of cool kids, laughing and playing as if they hadn’t any cares in the world.

Jim knew then that that was the last time he’d ever see him.

* * *

Exactly a week later – twelve days from Christmas – Mother Kirk had driven Jim back to Iowa City to drop off a job application at _Galaxy Comics_ – the kitschy comic book shop that had been Jim’s third-favorite place after his bedroom and Iowa City’s one old timey cinema from the time he was nine years-old and just beginning to develop his long-standing obsession with _Iron Man_ and _Guardians of the Galaxy_. While she waited in the truck and alternated between bitching out and flirting with Frank over the phone, he strolled into the store in pursuit of its owner – a man he’d started thinking of as his unofficial uncle after several years’ worth of enthusiastic and emotionally heavy conversations with him about everything from _The Watchmen_ to _Star Wars_ to the pains of growing up.

Pike was never hard to find. On that Thursday afternoon, he was posted up behind the front counter in a steel folding chair, reading Vonnegut.

“Jim!” Almost as soon as Jim had walked in the door, Pike was raising his reading glasses up off of his face and getting to his feet, smiling in a way that often made Jim warm and mournful in tandem, how much it reminded him of his father. When Jim slapped his application down on the counter in front of him just this shy of triumphantly, Pike had given him a vaguely amused look, mouth quirking up at one corner, and said, “Finally finished, son?”

“Yep!” Jim rocked on the balls of his feet, restless and antsy as usual, as he watched Pike pluck his glasses off of his head to relocate them back over his eyes and scan over his application, most of which contained information the man was already aware of just having known him so long. He was going to say something – “You need me to get anything else?” probably – when Pike beat him to the punch and asked, just like he always did, “How’s your mom?”

“She’s okay,” was Jim’s instinctive reply. He fiddled with the sleeve of his hoodie where it peeked out from beneath the cuff of his faux-leather jacket, thoughtlessly working the fabric between his fingers. “She got a raise last week.”

“ _That’s_ good news. Good timing, too.” Pike flipped the application over to examine the reverse side. “How ‘bout Sam? He likin’ the UK?”

“Yeah, I guess.” In truth, Jim actually hadn’t a clue how Sam was doing – his brother hadn’t really made a point of keeping in touch after he’d shipped off to Cambridge – but it would have felt like admitting to something like shitting the bed or having cancer to say that, so he’d went with a much more innocuous response.

Pike had simply hummed in polite acknowledgement, then said – confirming a decision he’d likely already made the second he handed Jim a blank application the week before – “Okay, son.” Looked up, smiled at Jim. “You’re hired.”

Jim, of course, had launched into a victory dance then – all punching fists and popping hips and all too necessary leaps in the air – and Pike had laughed his gravelly, leonine laugh at him, shaking his salt-and-pepper head at the exuberance of youth, or whatever the fuck happened to have possessed the crazy teenager in front of him.

“What size t-shirt d’you wear?” he asked around his chuckling, and at that moment, it occurred to Jim in a manner much like divine revelation that he was about to be bestowed with an official _Galaxy Comics employee t-shirt_ – an object and an honor he regarded most highly.

“Adult medium,” he replied, all sparkly and anime around the eyes.

It was then that Pike had raised his head and his voice to holler across the shop, in the general direction of a door in the back wall – “ _Mitchell!_ Grab me a medium shirt when you’re through scratching your ass in there!”

Jim – who had begun snickering in a fashion most childish at Pike’s playfully harsh choice of words – became abruptly awkward and almost timid when from the back room emerged the same kickflipping, face-pulling, olive-toned teen from the week before, a folded black t-shirt in one hand and an iPhone in the other. Skater Boy – or _Mitchell_ , as Pike had called him – hadn’t actually torn his eyes away from his smartphone’s screen until he was standing about a foot and a half away from Jim, but when he _did_ look at Jim, he gave him the same weird, subtly recognizing look he’d given him when they’d first locked eyes in the mall parking lot.

“Jim Kirk, this is Gary.” Pike motioned from one teen to the other. “Gary, meet your new co–”

“Wait–” Jim had cut Pike off without even really thinking about it, too suddenly astonished and taken aback to think twice before he was opening his mouth and words were barreling out of it. His face was a mask of furrowed bewilderment; he asked, “Your name is _Gary Mitchell?_ ”

Gary’s strange, unsettling expression – just as intrigued as it was utterly _bored_ – didn’t change. “Yeah.”

It was right around that moment that Jim had been struck with the distinct impression that he was the subject of some kind of bizarre cosmic joke. This was the _thirteenth_ person he’d met in his life to share a name with a _Star Trek_ character, and while he was aware that the names _Gary_ and _Mitchell_ were two of the most statistically common ones in the United States, the fact that _he_ – _James Tiberius Kirk_ – had found himself with over a dozen _Trek_ namesakes under his belt suddenly seemed less like a huge coincidence and more like a sign from above or beyond.

Pike – a veteran nerd and _Star Trek_ fanatic himself – understood Jim’s amazement immediately. “I was wondering when you two’d run into each other,” he chuckled. “I’m just surprised it didn’t happen sooner.”

“Why?” Pushing the screen-printed _Galaxy_ shirt into Jim’s hands, Gary had already turned tail and started back for the back room, talking over his shoulder at Pike as he went. “You know I hate humans and resist them at all costs.”

“Play _nice_ , Gare.” Pike had rolled his eyes in a way that, at the time, looked tired and oft-repeated to Jim, like he was more than used to doing it because of Gary. Then his gaze landed on Jim and softened, grew perceptibly warmer, and he said, “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon, kid,” because Pike had that distinctly adult clairvoyance about him that told him Mother Kirk was waiting and it was best not to try her patience too hard.

As Jim left the shop, passing into the frigid December air with his fingers wrapped snugly in his brand new t-shirt, he glanced back to find Gary idling in the back room doorway, phone raised up to his chest but gaze fixed squarely on him. The teen had, mysteriously enough, crossed his eyes at him a _second_ time before simply disappearing into the room, and Jim didn’t know exactly why Gary – the ambiguously dark look he had, his dry, sarcastic drawl, and all of the peculiar faces he made at him – made him feel so self-conscious and shy, but he _did_ , and Jim wasn’t quite sure what to do with that.

“Chris gave you the job, right?” His mom was off the phone by the time Jim had climbed back into the passenger seat of her cream-colored pickup, having exchanged conversation for _Candy Crush Saga_ , which she played with one wrist hooked casually over the steering wheel.

“He did,” Jim confirmed, fastening his seatbelt.

“Good.” Quickly locking the device, Mother Kirk dumped her phone into the one vacant cup holder – the other was occupied by a half-finished bottle of Sprite Jim had been nursing earlier – and put the truck in reverse, twisting at the torso and throwing her gaze backwards to make certain that she wasn’t on the verge or in the process of flattening anyone behind her. “You’re gonna need _something_ to get you out of the house if you’re really gonna do this online school thing next year.”

Jim had tried not to feel too weird or think too hard then about the fact that starting the next day, he was going to be working side-by-side with a person that made him feel vaguely like a pinned butterfly for no other reason than the way he’d happened to exist around him. His mother pulling out of the parking lot and heading back to Riverside and back to his yawn-inducing hell, he’d kept his eyes on _Galaxy Comics_ until the shop had receded enough from view so as to be indistinguishable, and then – not knowing what else to do – retrieved his phone from his kangaroo pocket and started a game of Mahjong.

* * *

Through the ass end of 2012 and the very beginning of 2013, Jim learned several things about Gary Mitchell.

 ** _One_** : Gary is one of those kids whose parents simply don’t exist.

Jim first became aware of this fact on the last day of December, after he’d been working part-time at _Galaxy_ for about two weeks. He doesn’t really know how or why the realization came upon him; he only knows that suddenly, it was very apparent to him that while he referenced his own mother semi-frequently in conversation – things she said, things she did and didn’t permit him to do, the simple fact of him having a relationship with her that included coming out of her womb close to sixteen years ago and living under her roof ever since – Gary was a member of that considerable minority of teenagers that _never_ talked about his parents and didn’t actually seem to have any, how aggressively autonomous he was and how many of his activities seemed to revolve around dancing to the beat of his own selfish drum.

“Why’d you start working here?” Jim had asked him on that Monday afternoon. He was sitting cross-legged in Pike’s chair behind the counter, playing _Pokémon Emerald_ on his DS while Gary lazily flipped through an issue of _The Defenders_ , lying prone on the floor like a customer totally _couldn’t_ come walking in at any moment.

Gary flicked to the next page, didn’t look up. “Why do you care?”

Jim had started to raise his shoulders in an asymmetrical, stuttering shrug – the right one haltingly coming up before the left one had even begun to inch skyward – but then he remembered that Gary wasn’t looking at him, so he formed his mouth around the first words that came to his mind. “My mom made me get a job because she wanted to get me out of the house. I think she’s tired of seeing my face.” And then, recalling the actual question he was supposed to be answering – “I guess I was just wondering if you were in the same boat.”

Stealthy Jim is very stealthy. That’s what _he_ liked to think, anyway.

Gary had merely rolled his jaw, gaze still invariably fixed on the comic he was occupied with. It was several moments – all of them increasingly uncomfortable for Jim to sit through, the socially anxious boy he is – before he’d replied, in a way that sounded very honest and very unashamed, “I like money.” A beat, then – much less sincerely, Jim thought – “Helps me get drugs and video games.”

Jim snorted loudly despite himself. “Are you serious?”

Gary had finally looked up at him at that, deadpan, blinking. “You decide,” he’d said, and then it was back to _The Defenders_ and being an island of a person – remote and inaccessible and that much more unsettling for Jim to be around.

That was only one of many times Gary had made Jim feel exceptionally dull and childish in the first couple of months they’d known each other. Here was Gary – a teenage drug-user with a clique and skateboarding skills that could likely put Tony Hawk to shame – and next to him there was Jim – a borderline recluse living on a farm in Bumfuck, Iowa who spent his time playing video games, drinking chocolate milk out of an adult-size sippy cup, and talking with people who lived hundreds if not thousands of miles away from him over the Internet. Boring and immature didn’t even _begin_ to cover it.

 ** _Two_** : Gary isn’t from around these parts.

On January 2nd, 2013, Gary had walked into work sixteen minutes late in an old Judas Priest hoodie and his iconic patched leather jacket and said, “It’s too motherfucking cold out here.”

Pike – who had since stopped caring about Gary’s habitual tardiness as well as his foul language, Jim had discovered – squinted up from the Kerouac he’d been reading at the counter and remarked, “Welcome to Iowa, kid.”

“I don’t know how you bumpkins deal with it.” Gary affected a full-body shiver, beelining for the back room to shed his outer layers and only glancing for a second at Jim where he was camped out on the floor with a crate of _Sandman_ volumes. “Down south if it ever got this cold, we’d all just assume we were living in the end times and give the fuck up.”

“Well, you’re not in New Orleans anymore, where it’s seventy degrees in _December_.”

Jim had spent a moderately embarrassing amount of time up until that point trying to guess where exactly Gary came from – he _knew_ based on his complexion and features alone that he almost _definitely_ wasn’t an Iowa native – but _New Orleans_ was a place he hadn’t even considered. New York or Los Angeles, maybe, but never _New Orleans_.

Gary spun on his heel then to walk backwards into the break room and wag his tongue – insolent and just fucking _weird_ – at Pike before he was completely out of sight. Pike had shot Jim a look across the shop – his expression caught at the intersection of exasperation, amusement, and ‘ _why?_ ’ – then muttered, “So glad I have you here now, son.”

“Why?”

“’Cause my wife doesn’t believe the shit I tell her about this kid.” Pike made a hissing noise through his teeth – something like ‘ _shht_ ’. “It’s nice to have a second witness around.”

Jim had simply laughed and switched out the second volume he’d been poring over for the third. “Glad to back you up, captain.” – and he saluted Pike with all the enthusiasm and reverence of a proud cadet, grinned with all of his teeth when Pike gave him a hearty laugh in reply.

 ** _Three_** : Gary had known Jim before he’d even set eyes on him for the first time.

Jim had wondered many times within the first two weeks of his casual association with Gary about what exactly was behind the strange look of quasi-recognition he’d given him in the Sycamore parking lot and again on the day he’d been hired. It was only a good while after he’d stopped thinking about it entirely that he actually got an answer.

Friday, January 4th and Jim was engaging in his typical Friday night activity: aimlessly scrolling through his dashboard to a soundtrack of Skype notifications and the best of the 80s, 90s, and today. He’d refreshed Tumblr for the fifth time that hour when he noticed a little red ‘ _1_ ’ hovering above his inbox, and he – assuming the message would be something silly from Sulu or something sweet from Gaila – clicked it so fast he might have sprained his index finger a little.

As it turned out, his hunch had been wrong.

Instead of coming from one of his Internet friends, the message was from Tumblr user _youngsupervillain_ , simply saying –

> **youngsupervillain** asked:  
>  _so I herd you liek kickflips_

Jim had known instinctively and immediately who the sender was, confirmed that knowledge when he clicked onto _youngsupervillain_ ’s blog and – after being unexpectedly assaulted with a KidzBop rendition of Evanescence’s _Bring Me to Life_ and just the unadulterated _horror_ that was the blog’s theme – found his perpetually aloof coworker’s name in the description along with his age, his pronouns, and some unambiguous instructions for anyone seeking to ask him to tag his content – “ _fuck off_ ,” basically.

Gary had been following or at least aware of Jim for some period of time before they’d accidentally encountered each other, but of course, he hadn’t actually said anything about it like a normal person would have. The reason for this is inextricably linked to the final and probably most important thing Jim has learned and is still in the process of learning about Gary Mitchell –

 ** _Four_** : the boy is, quite frankly, some kind of fucking _insane_.

* * *

Saturday, February 9th, 2013. Jim – who, as you may recall, spent nearly twenty-three hours awake the day before – is just beginning to permanently rise from his slumber at the exceptionally late hour of eleven o’clock after a long, hard day of waking up, rolling over, and going right back to sleep. His phone greets him first and foremost with a slew of text messages and Skype notifications from Bones, Gaila, and Spock – the most recent of which having been sent to him at 6:39 PM –

> **bones**      6:39 PM  
>  You slept all day again, didn’t you?

With a lazy, half-there smirk, Jim unlocks his phone to reply with a confident ‘ _yes_ ’ and the smuggest-looking emoji he can find.

He stays lying beneath his age-old quilt for about fifteen minutes – answering messages, confirming to interested parties that he’s still alive and breathing, checking his email, inspecting what his blog queue has posted in his absence – and he’d be more than content to keep doing what he’s doing for hours if it weren’t for the tiny hairs coating his teeth and the oily grossness of his face after having spent so much time asleep. Because he’s human and in dire need of some hygiene maintenance, though, he digs himself out of the cushiony grave of his bed and takes a trip to the bathroom so that he can brush his teeth, wash his face, take a piss – get shit done.

It’s as he’s doubling back and passing his bedroom doorway on his way downstairs – because, in addition to being a _dirty_ human, he’s also very much a _starving_ human – that he hears something _smack_ against the window above his bed. He stops mid-step to peer curiously into his room – squinting mystified and intrigued at his window from behind his clear-rimmed glasses – and he’s just about to decide his ears are playing tricks on him when there’s another sharp _smack_ and the sight of what is clearly a _rock_ bouncing off of the window pane.

It’s probably the clearest possible indicator of just how _stupid_ Jim is, but his initial, entirely reflexive thought is ‘ _Spock?_ ’. He _did_ ask him to kidnap him last night, after all.

Making his way across the room and onto his bed to see just what the hell is going on, Jim jumps a bit when, before he can make it all the way there, another rock _whack_ s against the glass. He then presses both hands to the window and peers through it at the ground below, half-expecting to find a crack-addicted raccoon or something equally ridiculous.

Of course, it _is_ something equally ridiculous. It’s _Gary Fucking Mitchell_ in all-black clothing with a handful of pebbles, staring up at him with his typically oxymoronic expression of impassive interest. Jim blinks once, twice – deeply suspicious of exactly what the _fuck_ his eyes are telling him – before pushing the window open and sticking his head out into the frigid February air.

“What are you doing here?!” He whisper-yells it, wholly disinterested in alerting his presumably asleep mother and her cop boyfriend to the fact that his crazy coworker/Tumblr mutual is currently standing outside of their house for God knows _what_ reason.

“Waiting for you to open the fucking window, obviously.” Gary makes a sort of nodding gesture towards the front side of the house. “Let me in, faggot.”

“Why?!”

“Because it’s fucking _freezing_ and if you don’t I’ll die of hypothermia just so I can haunt your ass for the rest of your life.”

Saddled with a healthy fear of the supernatural as he is, Jim quickly decides against having the Ghost of Workdays’ Past chained to him forever and, verbally wondering ‘ _why in the hell_ ’ this is actually happening, closes his window, runs downstairs, and opens the front door.

“You’re not seriously here.” He watches, completely dumbfounded, as Gary ascends the porch steps and approaches the entrance, spying the teenager’s beat up old Jetta where it’s parked in the front yard over his shoulder. “I can’t believe you’re actually _here_.”

When Gary gets close enough, he snatches one icy hand out to pinch Jim’s fleshy, freckled bicep _hard_ ; at Jim’s half-surprised, half-pained _yip_ , he says, “Believe it now?”

Jim rubs indignantly at his injured arm and, scowling softly, carefully nudges the door closed with his hip. He watches Gary survey the homey mess of the living room with a mostly indifferent gaze, feeling uncomfortably overexposed in an old t-shirt and mesh basketball shorts when the other is standing next to him wearing two layers of outerwear, ripped skinnies, and a glossy pair of combat boots.

“How did you find out where I live?” he asks, miraculously managing to be even _more_ surprised than he already is when Gary starts in the direction of the kitchen, attracting the attention of the tuxedo cat and the golden tabby perched intently at the bottom of the stairs when he does.

“I followed you from work, of course.” Gary says it like the answer should be completely obvious – which, really, it _wasn’t_ to Jim, who was more expecting him to have somehow triangulated his location via his IP address, dug through Pike’s records and lifted the information from his job application, or secretly installed a tracking app on his phone like some kind of insane hybrid hacker/stalker/genius. Halfway through the wide, rectangular archway leading into the kitchen, he notices the pair of felines watching him and abruptly goes from snarky and aloof to almost childishly thrilled, exclaiming, “Oh my _God_ , you have _cats!_ ” at a volume that has Jim instinctively throwing a marginally _terrified_ glance up the stairs and frantically waving his arms around in the universal gesture of ‘ _stop stop stop_ ’.

“Keep your voice down!” More whisper-yelling – Jim’s become an expert at it after years of sneaking around doing things he definitely _shouldn’t_ be with Sam. “My mom’s asleep and if she finds out you’re here she’ll probably hang me in my fucking closet.”

“Talk about child abuse.” By this point, Gary is crouched on the hardwood and coaxing Jim’s cats over to him with crooking fingers and a rapid succession of _tsk_ s, grinning toothily when the golden tabby submits first and darts towards him. He hovers a hand over the feline’s face, lets him tentatively sniff at him and push his fat yellow head against his palm, and asks, “What’re their names?”

Jim shifts awkwardly, still watching the top of the stairs like a hawk. “Cloud,” he replies, gesturing at the cat Gary is currently preoccupied with, then – with a nod towards the tuxedo cat still cowering a good distance away – “… and Mister Mistofelees.”

Gary shoots Jim a vaguely unimpressed look. “Like in _Cats?_ ”

“Yeah.”

“Mmnh.” His appetite for cat canoodling apparently sated, Gary resumes his full height and continues on into the kitchen with Cloud hot on his heels. Jim watches, stilled in the archway by his nearly overwhelming disbelief, as the other briefly examines the various bags of chips congregating on the counter before turning his attention to the refrigerator, and it’s almost a struggle for him to actually open his mouth and speak, then, to repeat his earlier question in a tone that’s only moderately calmer and ask, “What are you doing here?”

It shouldn’t be too hard to see why Jim is so shocked. On top of Gary having literally _followed him home_ to find out where he lived and now, what – preparing to food right out of his refrigerator? – there’s the simple fact that up until this point, Gary has never expressed anything but negligible, fleeting interest in him. Sure, every now and then he might send Jim a link to a funny post on Tumblr or pester him in the wee hours of the morning to co-op with him, and about one afternoon out of every week he’s a bit friendlier than usual at work, but Jim has been under the impression from the very beginning that Gary was only interested in him insofar as he was a convenient audience for him, the way most of the people he’s met in real life are.

Gary hangs an arm over the refrigerator door – just as casual as can be – and ducks his head to look inside. Jim doesn’t think he’s actually going to answer him until he blinks, rolls his head against his shoulder, and says – not budging his gaze an inch – “I’m bored and starving and nothing’s actually open.” At the noisy, impeccably-timed _groan_ Jim’s stomach suddenly emits, Gary snickers and adds, “Sounds like you are, too.”

Jim reaches back to scratch, just a tad sheepish, at his nape. “Maybe.”

That, my friends, is how he ends up with two cats and Gary Mitchell in his bed on the very cusp of Sunday, eating cold pizza and rocky road ice cream while watching _Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!_ and playing as cooperative a game of virtual Spider Solitaire as possible.

“Put that six over that seven,” he instructs with his chin hovering near Gary’s shoulder and his eyes glued to his phone’s screen, idly digging his spoon through one particularly nutty hill of ice cream.

Gary’s phoneless hand comes up to smack Jim directly in the face. “Fuck off,” he counters, then does exactly what Jim said while Cloud nestles against his side and declares him his new favorite two-legged, purring loudly all the while.

* * *

Early Sunday afternoon, Jim comes to sandwiched between two warm, vibrating felines with his glasses still (just barely) on his face. He vaguely recalls letting Gary out of the house the night before and clumsily dumping _two_ plates, _two_ bowls, and _two_ spoons in the sink before stumbling back up to bed, but the strangeness of the whole experience and his relative lack of brainpower immediately after waking up convinces him he hallucinated it all. It wouldn’t have been the first time his brain came up with something wild like that under the influence of too much sleep and too much sugar.

This notion holds up through much of the rest of the day until at around eight PM – about half an hour after Mother Kirk and Frank have departed on their biweekly Sunday night dinner date and Jim has resigned himself to actually doing his homework _at home_ instead of in class tomorrow morning – a rock is sharply flung against Jim’s window pane and, in his shock, Jim damn near jumps out of his skin and ages about fifteen years in the span of a single second.

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel – let down your hair!”

“ _Hee-_ fucking _-haw_.” Jim – now hanging halfway out of the window and shivering furiously at the cold – makes a grand show of rolling his eyes at the crazy person standing ten feet below him for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. “I thought last night was a dream.”

“Wasn’t it?” Gary swivels his head in the direction of the front door. “Come meet me.”

"How do you know my mom's not home?"

"Where's her ugly ass truck?" Gary gives him another emphatic jerk of the head, this time a bit more insistently. " _Come meet me._ "

Fifteen minutes later – homework abandoned and _Flamin’ Hot Cheetos_ appropriated from the kitchen – Jim is snapping semi-blurry photos of Gary while trailing him on his impromptu tour around his house and chronicling the informal home invasion he’s currently being subjected to for his followers on Tumblr.

> **rameseas** :
>
>> _its in my house now guys help me_

“Holy _shit_ , there’s more!” They’re in the laundry room, now, where Jim’s third of four cats – a calico Manx – and two dogs – a Siberian Husky/Alaskan Malamute mix and a Chocolate Labrador – currently doze in a pile of fur and fabric beside the swishing, shuddering washer. The dogs are instantly on their feet at the sight of people, leaping up to crowd Gary up against the dryer and sniff at his legs and scarlet-tipped fingers, and Gary is grinning in a fashion just this shy of maniacal when he says, chuckling softly, “Tell me their names.”

“The husky is named Zelda.” Jim pauses, bottom lip caught between his teeth, to capture Gary bending at the waist to pucker his lips at Zelda’s muzzle and laughing openly when she immediately takes to licking the spicy food residue from his mouth. “The lab is called Obi.”

“What about the cat?” Gary makes a noise kind of like quiet _screeching_ when said feline begins to hop almost rabbit-like over to him, apparently noticing for the first time that, “It has no tail!”

“That’s Padmé. You can pick her up – she’s super friendly.”

Gary wastes no time tucking his stolen bag of _Hot Cheetos_ between his legs and scooping Padmé up to cradle the round, hefty weight of her against his chest just as one would an infant. Jim – thumb poised over his smartphone’s capture button – very nearly _screams_ when the other whispers, dropping the lightest, gentlest little kiss on the rosy tip of Padmé’s nose, “This is the sexiest cat I’ve ever seen in my _life_.”

> **rameseas** :
>
>> _breaking news: tumblr user youngsupervillain is a ZOOPHILIAC  
>  _ _you heard it here first folks_

“This your mom’s room?” Gary raises his nose to sniff the air, then grimaces – disgusted – at the scent that permeates the room like a fog. “Smells like Paco Rabanne.”

“Her and her boyfriend are doing date night tonight,” Jim says by way of explanation, getting three pictures of Gary’s wrinkled, repulsed expression in a rapid succession of artificial shutter clicks. He abruptly lowers his phone when Gary all but _dives_ for his mother’s bed, suddenly much less interested in his little photography project and much _more_ interested in half-saying, half-yelling, “Oh my _God_ , get out of my mom’s bed!”

“Is this a Tempur-Pedic?” Gary bounces once, twice, thrice on the edge of the mattress before taking it upon himself to swing his feet over and up onto the bed – boots and all – and fold his arms beneath his head, stolen bag of chips planted in the center of his stomach.

“It’s a knockoff,” Jim answers before he can stop himself, then – rolling his eyes and wordlessly cursing himself with a whispered ‘ _tch_ ’ – “You’re getting dirt on the covers, come _on_ –“

“Would it help if I took off my shoes?” When Jim – only a little alarmed by the fact that he feels familiar enough with Gary to do so – reaches for one of his ankles to start forcibly _pulling_ him out of the bed, Gary jerks his leg out of his reach and then presses the frost-and-grass-encrusted sole of his boot against Jim’s stomach, digging one spindly _Cheeto_ out of the bag and jamming it between his teeth like a cigarette as he asks, “Why’re you so afraid of your mom? Don’t tell me she’s a Mommy Dearest.”

“ _Uh_ , she _will_ be when she finds _dirt_ in her bed.”

“Tell her Gary the Friendly Ghost put it there.”

Jim casts a long, pious gaze at the ceiling and silently asks the invisible deity there _how_ and _why_ he ended up – for absolutely _no_ apparent reason – with this insane person in his house not once, but _twice_ within a single twenty-four hour period. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t get an answer.

> **rameseas** :
>
>> _call 911_
> 
> _tagged as_ : #i need HELP

“I just want to apologize…” His voice is quavering, breath coming harsh and heavy in short, shuddering gasps. “To my mom, and her mom, and her mom’s mom. I’m sorry to everyone.” He affects a noisy sniffle – a real moist, snotty one. “I was very naïve.”

In the background, muffled by distance and the very solid door separating them – “I know you’re in there, faggot.”

“I was very naïve and very stupid and I shouldn't have put myself in danger like this with my selfish ways.”

“Are you recording yourself?” Some rustling, a faint scoff. “ _Christ_ , you’re a shit host.”

Jim _does_ , in fact, have his iPhone’s front camera focused on and recording the top half of his face while he holds a flashlight beneath his chin and calls upon six years of being a theatre kid to cry on demand, crocodile tears in full force as he stutters and mutters his way through his very best _Blair Witch_ reenactment. He’s crouched among several pairs of sneakers, sandals, and slippers on the floor of his closet as he puts on this performance, watching Gary sprawl out, eat _Cheetos_ , cuddle with Cloud, and watch Netflix in his bed through the thin crack he’s left in the door.

“I am so, _so_ sorry.” He throws in a sharp, breathy little sob right there for good measure. “I love you so much, mom.”

“Why don’t you come out and cuddle me for a little while?”

“What was that?” Jim lets his eyes go all wide and wild with panic, inhaling quick and violent and jumping right into hyperventilation mode. “I’m scared to close my eyes…” He hams it up even more and honest to God _wheezes_. “And I’m scared to open them–”

“I’ll save you the crumbly Cheetos at the bottom of the bag.”

“I’m so, so scared.” Jim screws his eyes up _aneurysm_ tight and swallows as wetly and as audibly as he can. “I’m going to die in here.”

It’s at that moment exactly that the closet door comes flying open and Gary is suddenly in the doorway yelling, “ _Here’s Johnny!_ ”, and in response, Jim – legitimately _startled_ due to having his eyes closed at the time – makes probably the most embarrassing, schoolgirl reminiscent noise he’s ever made in his _life_ and reflexively flings his phone in the direction of Gary’s face, just managing to clip him in the chin when he does.

> **rameseas** :
>
>> _the blair witch project: home invasion edition_

Somehow, Gary ends up leaving before Mother Kirk and Frank get home; Jim and Zelda actually stand side by side on the front porch and watch him drive off in his tar-colored Volkswagen not even a full _fifteen minutes_ before the two heads of the household come waltzing through the front door, already halfway through a tier seven screaming match from what Jim can hear all the way upstairs in his room.

And Jim knows she can’t understand him, but sitting with his back up against the icy window and blankly staring at his partially completed geometry homework, he mentally reviews every increasingly strange thing that’s happened to him since he first laid eyes on Gary Mitchell and asks the mountain-sized dog lying beside him – not certain whether he’s perturbed, amused, bewildered, or some monstrous combination of the three – “What the actual _fuck_ is going on?”

Zelda casts her adoring blue gaze on him. ‘ _He let me lick the Cheeto dust off his face_ ,’ she seems to project. ‘ _That kid is worth keeping around_.’

Jim can’t help but wonder if the dog is right. She’s never steered him wrong so far.

* * *

He doesn’t see Gary again until the next day, when his mom picks him up from school and drops him off at _Galaxy_ to work his usual three-hour shift. To his surprise, his coworker is already there when he walks in – lounging in Pike’s chair with his feet kicked up on the counter, ankles crossed.

Jim simply stares at him for a moment, grasping at his backpack strap. “Did I dream it?” he asks.

Gary levels an even look at him from over his iPhone. “That video still on your phone?”

A quick perusal of his Camera Roll confirms that _yes_ – the miniature horror movie from the night before is, in fact, _still_ present and _still_ very much real.

When Jim looks back up at Gary, the very slightest of smirks playing on his lips, Gary simply crosses his eyes at him again and goes back to thumbing at his touchscreen, obviously content to leave it at that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if you think gary is creole, you're incorrect. i'll reveal his actual ethnicity sometime later.
> 
> comments, critiques, and questions are heavily encouraged and heartily welcomed.
> 
> \- gabi


	4. 003 MUAY THAI, MAI TAI

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It is the night of Tuesday, February 26, 2013 when Spock Novak punches his half-brother in the face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not sure how obvious it is, but i'm trying out a slightly different, more formal, marginally more distant writing style for this story's spock-centric chapters. i don't think i'll ever be completely satisfied with anything spock-centric i'll ever write just because i think my style is too inherently emotive for him, but i don't think that can be helped at this point in time. this might be something i come back and edit later.
> 
> also - sybok's characterization is an extremely, uh... self-derived invention. i'm gonna say about 20% of it is based on his canon character, 80% of it is all the work of the co-conspirator and i. keep in mind though that pretty much _all_ of this story's characters are being treated as real people that just happen to be named after _trek_ characters, and that the writing/plot/characterization is going to reflect that.

It is the night of Tuesday, February 26, 2013 when Spock Novak punches his half-brother in the face.

This is not intentional. Under almost all circumstances, Spock would never dream of assaulting _anyone_ – least of all his _brother_ – in such a fashion, but tonight, a set of extenuating circumstances that make his actions understandable, if no less forgivable or excusable, is in play.

Every Tuesday and Thursday for the past two weeks, Spock has dragged a somewhat reluctant Sybok to a combination kickboxing/Muay Thai class held in a gym smack dab in the middle of the Meatpacking District – the kind of place their father with his bourgeois Jewish tendencies would likely have a conniption fit over if he ever discovered they were spending their nights there. He’d initially persuaded Sybok on the pretense that he needed something to get him out of the house, which was usually code for ‘ _our father is driving me insane and I need to be away from him so as to not willfully cease to live_ ’.

“ _Okay_ ,” Sybok had said, sighing heavy and melodramatic over the phone and even hooking a whine on there. “It’s against my moral code to participate in such violent, uncivilized–”

“Last week you told me a story that involved you throwing a beer bottle at someone’s head.”

“Such _uncivilized_ and _barbaric activity_ ,” Sybok barreled on as if Spock hadn’t interrupted him at all, only raising his voice a couple of decibels to speak over him. “But I’ll do it because I love you. We’ll just tell Dad I’m taking you to one of your nerdy chess tournaments – he’ll eat that shit up.”

So intrepid Spock and Sybok set out on a daring quest to kick ass and deceive their father. Truth be told, they’ve likely been on that quest or some variation of it since they were five and eleven, respectively, and only concerned with carrying out their informal and instinctive insurrection against the rest of the world – most especially the parts of it that attempted to restrict and define them.

However, I’ve digressed. Back to the subject at hand – how Spock ends up giving his brother a periorbital hematoma (or, in layman’s terms, a big ol’ shiner).

It’s about twenty minutes into the class and the primary activity has progressed from warm-up exercises to solo punches to solo kicks and finally to practicing with a partner – fifteen pairs of novice fighters spaced out on the padded floor and alternating between kicking and punching each other while their icy-eyed instructor roams the room, correcting stances and suggesting improvements.

Having signed up together and already insanely trusting of each other after nearly sixteen years’ worth of being emotionally and psychologically attached at the hip, Spock and Sybok naturally partner up with one another to perfect their technique. The older of the two has relegated himself to being the younger one’s target, forearms padded with foam rectangles for Spock to beat against.

Things start out innocently enough – a jab with each gloved fist and then a kick with one foot; two more punches and then a strike with the other foot. As he’s always been intensely methodical by nature and blessed a mind that bends, bows, and bounds with numbers like a well-oiled machine engineered for just that purpose, Spock meticulously paces each action with all the precision of a timekeeper, never letting any more or any less than a second of time pass between every blow he lands against Sybok’s shielded forearms.

He’s throwing his fifty-seventh punch when his tempo initially changes by only a fraction of a second, synthetic leather of his boxing glove connecting with cherry red foam just an instant sooner than it should. He attributes the error to fatigue – he has been going at this for quite a while now, after all – and, quickly correcting his speed, continues on.

But then he slips up a second time. A _third_ time. Somehow – heedless of his incessant mental counting and the mathematical precision with which he calculates each strike – his punches and kicks keep on coming swifter and swifter, until he’s lost track of his internal rhythm entirely and isn’t quite certain how exactly he’s to find it again.

“Hey, now.” Sybok smiles something easy and just a tad joking from behind his guarded forearms. “Hittin’ kinda hard there, bruh.”

Spock can barely hear him over the static roaring in his ears.

That thunderous, almost deafening din doesn’t cease even when Spock’s fist misses the practice pad entirely and goes pummeling directly into the bridge Sybok’s nose with a dull _smack!_. It is only after Sybok’s knees have hit the ground and the entire class has gone shocked and still around them that the sound recedes from a great roar to a faint ringing, that Spock abruptly surfaces to his quivering arms and labored breathing and the way his skin is tight and close enough to nearly _suffocate_ him.

The instructor is across the room and helping Sybok to his feet in nearly no time. “Are you alright?” she asks him, her typical mask of calmness faltering even further than it already has when crimson begins to run liberally from Sybok’s nostrils and over his top lip.

“Ugh, shit…” Sybok presses his face into what bare skin he can get at on his forearm and groans softly, briefly screwing his eyes shut in pain. When he opens them, he lets them fall upon the teenager still standing paralyzed and quavering not two feet in front of him; for some unknown reason, Spock cannot find in them any trace of malice or betrayal.

The younger one swallows thickly. “It was an accident.”

Sybok, oddly enough, _grins_ at that, the expression still blatantly evident from behind his arm in the beautiful crinkling at the corners of his eyes. “I sure as hell _hope_ it was.”

* * *

 

Three blocks down from the gym is a large-windowed hole in the wall selling liquor. That is where our daring duo heads off to after their premature departure from Muay Thai, still wearing their sweat-soaked gym clothes beneath hoodies and imitation leather jackets and fur-lined parkas.

“I’m sorry, Sybok.” Spock reaches up to adjust the knit wool beanie on his head, tugging it down over the tips of his ears as he walks in step beside his brother. His gaze is glued to the halved tampons jammed into each of Sybok’s nostrils – an ingenious if somewhat undignified solution to the bleeding as suggested by their instructor – but he wills it to refocus on the older one’s eyes as he says, “I didn’t mean to strike yo–”

“ _Oh_ , give it a rest.” Sybok’s tone is the affectionately exasperated thing it occasionally becomes in the face of Spock’s stubbornness, dark eyes rolling skyward but still projecting an almost unfathomable degree of fondness for the teenager that just socked him in the face not five minutes ago. “I’m not _mad_ at you.”

“I should have been paying more attention.”

“I should have been covering my face.”

“I shouldn’t have been so careless.”

“You wanna go one more round?” Swiveling an index finger around in a tight circle for emphasis, Sybok throws Spock an impish look, something tinged just slightly with equal amounts of warmth and amusement. His arm momentarily comes out in front of the younger one when, upon reaching the end of the second block and the edge of the sidewalk, a car comes whipping down the perpendicular street and turning into traffic at a speed that’s not only dangerous but also plain _foolish_ in Manhattan, then – with a middle finger waved emphatically in the direction of the vehicle that cut them off – “You’re still my favorite nerd and we can still go on our biweekly brother-dates. Fraternal vows have _not_ been annulled.”

Spock’s left eyebrow ticks about a fourth of an inch upwards. “I thought that Gaila was your favorite nerd.”

As he finishes looking both ways to make sure no other careless drivers are on their way to crashing into them, Sybok flashes Spock a toothy grin and gives a quick tilt of his head. “I only say that to tease you.”

Spock lets that thought marinate for a bit while they complete their journey across the third and final block and at last arrive at _Wine on Nine_ , where his brother immediately sets about searching for the ingredients for some mystery cocktail while he contents himself with awkwardly trailing him around the store and trying to get his hands to stop shaking in his hoodie’s cavernous unipocket.

Plucking a bottle of orange Curaçao from a shelf hosting a veritable rainbow of liqueurs, Sybok casts a quick glance Spock’s way, at his downcast eyes and the barely-there pyramid between his brows. That fleeting look is apparently all he needs to see _something_ – Spock isn’t quite sure what – because he asks him, almost deceptively casual, “You okay, bruh?”

“Mmnh.” Spock considers the question for a moment, struggles to come up with an answer – words and the probing fingers of his mind can’t seem to get at one.

“Don’t overthink it,” Sybok reminds him. Spock cannot begin to recount the sheer number of times the older one has said these exact words to him in his lifetime, try as he steadfastly might.

“I feel…” He shuts his eyes – blocking out external stimuli often helps him to be clearer about disentangling, uncovering, and describing exactly what’s going on in the strange zones of his mind that govern his emotions – then decides, a bit unsatisfied, on, “Unsettled.”

Sybok has long been well-versed in Spock’s limited yet impossibly nuanced emotional vocabulary, has in fact been its primary linguist and developer for the better part of the younger one’s life. Moving on to the store’s wide selection of rums and squinting his eyes to read the labels of small twenty-centiliter bottles, Sybok hums quietly and asks, “Unsettled like _anxious_ -unsettled? _Upset_ -unsettled? _Uncomfortable_ -unsettled–?”

“More like…” A lengthy gust of air leaves Spock through his nostrils after he becomes suddenly conscious of the fact that he was holding it in. “Frustrated.”

Sybok snatches up two miniature bottles of Bacardi Gold before searching out the store’s drink mixers. Spock already knows what his next question will be before it’s even left his mouth – they’ve been through this exercise so many times before. “Why?”

Spock stares long and hard at the irregular matrix of dull scuff marks on the floor, vaguely irritated by their presence as well as with himself. “I don’t know.”

Sybok’s fingers go still around the neck of a bottle of orgeat; he turns and looks at Spock again, but this time, he lets his concerned gaze linger, lets it trace over and fold around his younger counterpart’s sharp features and the subtle tension in his face. Pulling away from the shelf, he brings his free hand around to rest at the juncture of Spock’s neck and shoulder, gently pressing into the honey-brown skin there, and for a moment it appears as though he’s going to say something very serious and emotionally resonant… but then his eyes take on a distinctly playful shape and he says, “If you’re still wound up about the punch, I can sock you one back and make it even.”

Spock stares up into his brother’s eternally kind, eternally familiar face. “Would it concern you if I said I would welcome that?”

Sybok’s mouth twists up at that, his expression somehow puckish even when he’s projecting this quiet, sad sort of distress with his eyes and his brows. “Just a little.”

Spock simply returns his gaze to the floor, listens to the impasse between them spring out of nothing and grow at exponential speed. He longs for a way to kill it, somehow, to fill it with words and let this correspondence go on, but of course, he hasn’t the faintest clue what to say or how to say it without Sybok guiding him with questions and instructions.

Talking like this has never not been a feat of near-monumental proportions for Spock. With Sybok, it’s always been moderately easier than it has been with almost anyone else, but the familiarity and shared genetic material between the two of them will never entirely make up for all of Spock’s social deficits or the jungle his mind becomes when he’s forced to put it to words, just like magic will never exist and sleep sorcerers will never sprinkle sand on his eyelids from their faraway moon bases, much as his mother tried to tell him they would when he was smaller and no less sleepless.

Sybok doesn’t take long to catch on to the younger one’s uncertainty. Instead of pressing on in the gently encouraging, softly insistent way he most often does in these conversations, however, he simply draws Spock a half-step closer, presses a tender kiss to his forehead – beard tickling the bridge of Spock’s nose when he does – and murmurs, “Come on.” Seizing the bottle of orgeat he’d momentarily abandoned from the shelf, he nudges Spock in the direction of the checkout counter, says, “Let’s hurry up and get out of here.”

There’s a large, burly man with cropped blond hair and at least three gold hoops in each of his ears manning the register when the brothers approach. His focus seems to bypass Spock entirely once the two of them hit the counter, instead immediately attaching itself to the ultra-absorbent cotton cylinders still stuffed into Sybok’s nostrils, one of which quite obviously has a tail.

“Yikes,” he intones as Sybok begins unloading bottles onto the checkout counter – the rum and orgeat in his hands and the Curaçao tucked carefully between his arm and side. “What happened there?”

“Oh, a burglar got into my apartment, tried to snatch this one up.” Sybok cocks his head briefly at Spock for emphasis as he retrieves his wallet from the pocket of his sweatpants, mouth working up into a smirking, grinning thing with implications the younger one isn’t quite able to puzzle out. “I couldn’t let them get away with that, y’know?”

“I’m sure.” Apparently past eyeballing the tampons in Sybok’s nose, the cashier now roams his intent stare over the entirety of the man – his freckled caramel complexion, the silver ring hooked at the left corner of his bottom lip, what sturdy musculature is apparent beneath his heavy parka and threadbare sweatshirt, his thick dreadlocks bundled up in a festive floral headscarf – and his tone changes almost imperceptibly when he says, seemingly apropos of nothing, “You know, you look really… _exotic_.”

Spock doesn’t even bother to conceal his kneejerk response – as soon as he hears the word ‘ _exotic_ ’ come out of the cashier’s mouth, he’s rolling his eyes and cutting them irritably to the side with a silent, piercing intensity capable of _scalping_ a man. He can’t say he didn’t expect him to say something like that – he and Sybok, both with their mixed black and Jewish heritage and the nebulous ethnicity it endows them with, are frequent targets of that kind of unintentionally backhanded flirting, most especially when they’re out _together_ instead of apart (because _exoticism_ runs in families, apparently) – but that annoyed, quietly simmering expectation makes the comment no less vexing to him. In fact, it likely only makes his exasperation that much more intense.

Sybok, for his part, has a much less openly displeased reaction – ironic considering he’s almost always the more emotive of the two of them. His fingers, previously digging around in his wallet for his driver’s license, go momentarily still before he catches himself and continues doing what he was doing, albeit a bit slower than before. The older one raises an eyebrow – whether it looks incredulous or amused is up to the viewer, really – then, fixing the cashier with a very even look – “You mean like a tropical bird?”

Just as expected, confusion bleeds into the cashier’s expression at that. “Well, _no_ –”

“Yeah, that’d be kind of ridiculous. You meant like a _dancer_ , right?” The innuendo attached to the word ‘ _dancer_ ’ is made abundantly clear by the way Sybok says it – voice low, suggestive, almost conspiratorial.

Apprehension and perhaps even a note of anger join the perplexity on the cashier’s face. “You _know_ that’s not what I meant–”

“ _Obviously_ I don’t.” Sybok drops his driver’s license on the counter and slides it towards the cashier, not in the mood for playing around anymore if the abruptly irritated, slightly wild look he has about him is anything to go on. “Can we wrap this up here?”

It is only after a beat of terse, charged silence that the cashier obliges, checking Sybok’s license and ringing up his alcohol in a markedly brusque fashion. As Spock shadows his brother on his way out of _Wine on Nine_ , he feels the pair of eyes stonily boring into their backs until the door swings closed behind them, underscoring their exit with a harsh metallic jangle.

“I was gonna give that asshole my number, too,” Sybok scoffs, shivering at the shift of their surroundings from tepidly warm to frigidly cold. “’ _Exotic_ ’, like I’m some kind of fucking animal. _Please_.”

Spock merely shakes his head in displeased solidarity and walks in step with his older brother, both of them heading off in the direction of West 23rd Street and their second home.

* * *

 

Because Sybok lives in Chelsea, their trek to his apartment doesn’t take very long at all. Up four flights of stairs and down to the very end of the hall they go, vaguely jittery with anticipation until Sybok finally lets them into his stylish, bohemian two-bedroom flat – something he as a university student could not afford were it not for the help of their father.

“Go lay down on the couch,” Sybok immediately instructs Spock the instant they’ve both passed through the doorway, already heading for the kitchen with his bag of assorted liquors. “I’ll bring you a clean t-shirt in a second.”

Careful to flick the latch into its _locked_ position and fasten the security chain after he’s closed the door, Spock wordlessly follows his brother’s directive and goes into the living room – passing up Sybok’s room, the bathroom, and the bedroom he’s essentially claimed for himself on the way there – peels off his beanie, leather jacket, hoodie, and sneakers, and stretches the whole long, gangly length of himself over the sofa. As he lays his crown against an armrest and listens to the sounds of Sybok moving around in the kitchen behind him – dumping his parka down on the breakfast bar, poking around in cabinets for a glass and a drink mixer, unloading his newly acquired alcoholic goods onto the countertop – Spock lets his eyes fall shut and endeavors for probably the hundredth time to make baby steps away from the all-consuming tension he’s been brimming with for what has seemed like an eternity, but has actually only been two weeks. He focuses on the dim, pulsing lights embedded behind his eyelids and counts every inhale and exhale as they come to and as they leave him – _one_ , _one_ , _two_ , _two_ , _three_ , _three_ – until he’s lost touch with the outside world and only exists within the confines a thick mental cocoon, the kind Sybok taught him how to make when it first became clear that he couldn’t keep living the way he used to – raw, confused, and unbearable.

His eyes come abruptly open when a mass of fabric is dropped on his upturned face without warning.

“You can leave your dirty shirt with me,” Sybok says from somewhere above him, voice muffled behind thick cotton. “I’ll wash it and give it back to you on Thursday.”

Sitting upright and uncovering his face, Spock busies himself with pulling off his sweaty gym shirt and replacing it with the one Sybok has given him – soft and black and screen-printed with a Warhol soup can – while Sybok tosses himself into the ugly armchair adjacent to the sofa, clad in his own fresh t-shirt with his dreadlocks newly liberated from their headscarf and his nose free of tampons. Taking a swig from the cocktail he’s just made, the older one watches and waits until Spock has meticulously folded his soiled t-shirt and placed it on the coffee table along with his other discarded clothes before he speaks again, asking around the rim of his glass, “So what’s going on?”

It’s hard to think clearly in Sybok’s apartment – Spock associates the place too much with warmth and laughter and smoke and sleep. He closes his eyes again in an attempt to block it out, but its distinctive smell of lavender and incense still lingers with him.

“I don’t know.” This is an unacceptable answer, so Spock revises it – “A lot of things.”

The ice in Sybok’s glass audibly clinks together. “How’re things with Dad?”

“Bearable. He’s too occupied with work to be very present at home.”

“Isn’t it sad that we’d consider that a _good_ thing?” Sybok makes a quiet, hissing noise – something derisive and perhaps a bit shameful. “What about school?”

“No unusual complaints.”

“But do you _have_ complaints?”

“My teachers are still morons and my classmates still contemptible, yes–” Spock pauses at Sybok’s throaty laugh, feeling the muscles in his face instinctively try for a smile at the sound of it before he can school his expression back into impassivity. “But that’s to be expected at this point.”

“What about your friends? How’s Jim doing?”

Spock instantly recalls the conversation he had with Jim two weeks ago concerning his mother’s imminent marriage and the acute helplessness he felt when they were having it, his self-directed frustration at his inability to do anything but simply distract the other from the horrible and the inevitable. Jim is often troubled by matters pertaining to his home and family life – he always has been from the time he and Spock first began corresponding – but this fact has never desensitized Spock to the bizarre, wholly uncharacteristic sympathy Jim incites in him, nor has it made him any less silently frantic to alleviate his pain, even if only in infinitesimal ways.

Leaning his head back against the armrest once more, Spock brings an arm up to sling across his face, nose tucked into the inside of his elbow. “He’s… unsettled. He’s going through an unpleasant change at the moment.”

Sybok shifts audibly in his armchair. “You think that’s what’s bothering you?”

Spock _knows_ that Jim’s problems disturb him, but they’ve never disturbed him to the point of such omnipresent anxiety, never made him as restless and electric and slightly fractured on the inside as he is now. He highly doubts that they’re doing so this time.

“No.”

Sybok clears his throat and the ice in his glass tinkles a second time. “ _Okay_.” There’s a three-second pause before Sybok speaks again, voice ever so slightly strained and tight from drinking. “What about your other friends?”

Shuffling away his thoughts and concerns about Jim as one would a manila folder in a file cabinet, Spock shifts his focus over to the people he personally interacts with on a daily basis.

Nyota has been searching for part-time employment for the past month or so, but aside from the stress naturally associated with a job hunt, she’s been, in her words, ‘ _just fabulous_ ’. Only yesterday, Spock treated her to an early dinner after school, and together, they ate enough sushi to keep them for about a week and laughed in a way Spock hadn’t laughed in a long time – a somewhat pitiful statement, considering his ridiculously young age – and Spock knows in light of this fact that Nyota is perfect and the two of them as friends are perfect, so he doesn’t dwell on them any longer than a few seconds, as there’s nothing to be found or gained in doing so.

Gaila occupies a similar position in his life and his sentiments. Almost every night for the past week and a half, they’ve played _Mass Effect 3_ and _Civilization V_ on multiplayer into the wee hours of the morning, and six hours later when they reunite at school, Gaila has been invariably thrilled to see Spock even in his marginally crabby, half-asleep state – always reaching with ring-adorned fingers for his face so that she might press orange, glossy kisses to it and asking him a million questions that all amount in some way, shape, or form to ‘ _how are you?_ ’. He and Gaila are very much perfect as well, so he doesn’t think about them any longer than he did him and Nyota.

Then, of course, there is T’Pring.

Spock’s eyes open against his arm at the thought of his girlfriend-recently turned- _just close friend_ , at the accompanying knife that twists sudden and sharp in his gut. He wills himself to sit up – slowly, carefully – and when his eyes finally focus on Sybok where he sits about a foot away from him, he finds the other watching him patiently, swirling amber liquid around in a lowball glass.

Sybok raises an eyebrow at him, wordlessly questioning in the dimness of the room – the space illuminated only by the white fairy lights bordering the windows and the lamps of the city outside.

It takes Spock a moment or so to get his lips, teeth, and tongue to form words, but when he does and he speaks and he’s saying what he’s saying, he all at once knows why he politely pleaded with Sybok to take martial arts classes with him and why his stomach has been a complete mess for half a month and why it’s been even harder for him to go to school lately than it already is under normal circumstances, his body almost desperate to remain buried firmly beneath the sedimentary layers of his bedcovers for the rest of the morning and the rest of the day and the rest of the week –

– he _knows_ why he punched his brother in the face and why despite his remorse, it felt so _good_ to do it, felt like exhaling after going far too long without breathing, felt like _relief_ –

“I’m so angry.” Spock doesn’t get enough out of this statement alone, so he adds onto it, shocks himself a bit when he says – articulating the words with harsh, painful clarity – “I’m so _fucking_ angry.”

Sybok’s other eyebrow joins its twin up on his forehead, turning his expression of inquiry into one of muted astonishment – it’s all but a rarity for the younger of them to swear, after all. He braces an elbow against his armrest to straighten his posture in his chair, pushing himself fully upright in the face of the unforeseen shift in this conversation’s tone, and the concern in his voice is much more apparent than it was moments ago when he presses Spock with a gentle, “Why?”

Sybok is aware of Spock and T’Pring’s recent breakup – he was, in fact, the third person in the world to know about it, after Nyota and Gaila. He’s aware of T’Pring’s entreaty that she and Spock remain companionable, aware that even after their abrupt split they still see each other daily at school and on outings with their mutual best friends. He’s aware that T’Pring still texts Spock an average of twenty times a day, and that Spock still answers her.

What he _isn’t_ aware of is the fact that speaking with or merely _seeing_ T’Pring has become an exercise in not spontaneously detonating for Spock, that Spock cannot even begin to wrap his mind or his words or his usually impeccable comprehension around the thing of _her_ – the person he once considered his best friend and closest confidant excepting the boy living a thousand miles away from him and his older half-brother, the person he’s known for nearly four years and has experienced his first kiss/touch/time/ _everything_ with, the person he’s trusted with his most intimate thoughts and feelings in a way he hasn’t with _anyone_ – so easily and so clinically deciding to sever their romantic attachments and become ‘ _just friends_ ’ as if their relationship was _ever_ simply _friendly_ , as if the change would be as straightforward as going over the two of them with a fresh coat of paint in a brand new hue, as if replacing Spock with her new boyfriend – a white guy named _Stonn_ – was so _effortless_.

Of course, Spock couldn’t ever truly know the contents of T’Pring’s pretty head. Unlike his science fiction counterpart, he is not a telepath. But the years he’s spent being T’Pring’s close friend and boyfriend have lent him a degree of knowledge about her others simply can’t claim to possess, and that knowledge has always told him that whenever T’Pring speaks her mind, she speaks it wholly and without any reservations on the grounds of courtesy or emotional sensitivity.

When she told him the morning of February 8th that she didn’t love him the way she had for the past two years – intensely and adolescently and tenderly enough to hold his hand and be soft around him the way she wasn’t with anyone else – she in all likelihood meant it just as she said it, with no subtext or ulterior motive whatsoever.

It’s in light of all that – the betrayal and the unexpectedness and his confusion as to _why_ it all happened in the first place, whether he might have been able to prevent it if he had done something differently – that Spock feels this breathtaking, throat-constricting, body-quaking _rage_ the likes of which he normally only reserves for his father’s bullshit. It makes him want to _yell_ , it makes him want to _hurt_ something, it makes him want to disappear in a violent burst of flesh and steel and light –

“ _Spock_.”

Sybok’s voice spears suddenly through the mess of feeling currently enveloping Spock much in the same way his forced calm was earlier, makes him abruptly aware of the fact that the man is no longer in his chair and is instead hovering over him with a look of intense worry on his face, cocktail abandoned on the coffee table. The older one dips his head to better meet Spock’s eyes, drawing him out the best way he knows how to when he’s cognizant of how easy it is for the younger one to retreat into himself and not return for hours – sometimes even _days_ – and his tone is firm yet rounded at the corners when he says, “Talk to me.” Then, a little softer, “What’s going on?”

Spock opens his mouth for one long, intensely vexing moment, then – when he can’t force anything out of it, everything being so unspeakably chaotic and tangled and just _wrong_ – closes it, leans forward, and lets his head fall against Sybok’s stomach, crown pressing into the solid plane of his abdomen through the thin fabric of his t-shirt. Sybok makes a muted noise above him – something brief born in the back of his throat – and then his hand is coming up to rest against the nape of Spock’s neck, fingers pushing through the short, meticulously trimmed hairs there.

“What am I gonna do with you, huh?”

He says it playfully, he does, but Spock can hear the exhaustion creeping in around the edges of his question – the exquisitely warm weariness bred from almost sixteen years of dealing with and protecting and guiding and _loving_ a boy so ineffably neurodivergent and so impossibly _strange_ , who can rarely if ever articulate how he feels and lives in a state of near-constant exasperation and may just be the fussiest, smartest, thorniest little marble man there is or ever was.

When Spock pulls away to raise his eyes to Sybok’s face, he finds him smiling sadly down at him, expression soft and tired with compassion. The older one briefly turns away to retrieve his cocktail from the edge of the coffee table; when he comes back, he pushes the tumbler into Spock’s hands, says, “Drink.”

Spock doesn’t hesitate at the beverage’s alcoholic content – he’s consumed stronger drinks with his brother on much less solemn occasions. Not blinking twice, he downs the rest of the glass in a matter of mere seconds – much to Sybok’s surprise, judging by his wide-eyed expression.

“If I could have taped that just to show it to Dad and watch him stroke the fuck out, you _know_ I would’ve.” Taking the tumbler from Spock when the teenager passes it back to him, Sybok grins something amused and maybe a little proud, asks him, “You want another one? I’ll make it a little weaker this time.”

Spock simply gives his brother a slow, wordless nod, rubbing a hand over his eyes and swallowing around the burn of cheap rum in his throat.

He’ll tell Sybok about the _Battle Royale_ currently playing out in his head – he knows he’s capable of it. It’ll just take him thirty minutes, another drink, and perhaps a hot shower – time, alcohol, and relaxation have always worked wonders when it comes to making sense of the impossible labyrinth inside him, more incomprehensible notions and suggestions of feeling than the concrete machinery of bone, blood, and nerves.

When Sybok hands him a fresh mai tai – saffron-colored liquid close to overflowing from a glass decorated with translucent koi fish and bright red kanji – he asks him, probably already half-aware of the answer, despite the day and the time and what their father will inevitably have to say about it, “You wanna spend the night?”

Taking his drink and sipping generously from it – far past the point of personal responsibility and pacing himself, he does it so much in his day-to-day it makes him _sick_ , honestly – Spock nods his assent once more and closes his eyes against the kiss Sybok drops on the top of his head, already feeling invisible fingers of calm beginning to pry open the straightjacket-vice he keeps around his everything.

“Brother-to-brother sleepovers: my fucking _favorite_.” Sybok is already on his way back into the kitchen and reaching for the takeout menu magneted to his refrigerator door, digging his cellphone out of the pocket of his sweatpants while he muses aloud as he so often does.

“You remember that nineties sitcom _Sister Sister_ , with Tia and Tamera Mowry? We need to pitch a show just like that, except call it _Brother Brother_ and have _us_ be the stars. It would be hilarious! Just imagine it – Sybok the wild, free spirited older brother with Buddhist inclinations, and Spock the brooding, bad boy younger brother with Asperger’s syndrome and an IQ of one-hundred and sixty. America would eat that shit up. We could even still keep the funky fresh nineties clothing design.” Then, without even a second’s pause between the two topics – “How do we feel about dim sum?”

From where he sits on the couch, now propped up against the back of the sofa instead of the armrest, Spock gives Sybok a simple thumbs up and finishes off his drink with one lengthy drag, propping a foot up against the coffee table and retrieving his own phone from his own pocket. As he texts his mother about his plans to turn his visit with Sybok into an overnight one, he licks the taste of tropical tranquility from his teeth and takes a mental baseball bat to T’Pring’s face for maybe the thousandth time today, already planning out the exact speech he’s going to give to Sybok once their stomachs are full and they’re sufficiently intoxicated.

* * *

 

Wednesday morning, February 27th. It is 10:29 AM, the city is wide awake and moving fast, and Spock Novak is more hungover than he has ever had the pleasure of being in all of his short, nearly-sixteen years.

As he surfaces to a splitting headache, the glaring sun, and the small plethora of text messages waiting for him on his phone –

 

> **T’Pring Chasoren**      9:55 AM  
>  I’m sure Nyota and Gaila have already texted you, but I’m concerned about your whereabouts as well. Are you sick?
> 
> **Nyota Uhura**      8:52 AM  
>  hey, where are you? gaila and i thought you might have just been running late, but you’re still not here so… are you okay?
> 
> **Gaila Castellanos**      7:49 AM  
>  SPOCK MY LOVE where are you??? i have something for you but i cant give it to you if youre not here!!
> 
> **Dad**      Yesterday  
>  When you get home, I want to talk to you.

– it occurs to Spock that he is in his bedroom at Sybok’s apartment in Chelsea instead of at his parents’ Victorian brownstone thirty minutes away in Brooklyn, as his comforter is jade green instead of midnight blue and rather than physical, political, and road maps of various continents, Prince and Jimi Hendrix are staring at him from the posters thumbtacked to the wall. In a pain- and sleep-addled daze, the events of the previous night come back to him – from the borderline breakdown he very nearly experienced to his and Sybok’s late dinner of spring rolls and egg drop soup, over which he related to his brother all of his less-than-lovely feelings towards his recently-established ex-girlfriend, Sybok offered him one of his many brilliant drunken pep talks, and the night ended in many toasts and the two of them going well beyond the point of simply tipsy and onto straight up _blitzed_. Hence Spock’s overwhelming urge to smash his skull in with a sledgehammer and put himself out of his own misery at this very moment.

It takes some time – seven and a half minutes, to be exact – but Spock just barely manages to crawl out of bed, hold his head together with his hands so that it might not go flying apart in every conceivable direction, inch over to his bedroom doorway, and eventually make his way into the living room, where it is considerably cooler than the rest of the apartment, given its openness. There, Sybok sits cross-legged on the sofa with a whole carton of orange juice in his lap, vacant gaze fixed on something outside the window, something Spock can’t quite pinpoint.

Sybok shifts his focus over to Spock once he registers his presence, blinking hard twice – obviously in some state of intensely painful grogginess – before grinning toothily and gesturing expansively to his face where it’s growing distinctly blue-violet around the eyes. “See what you did to me?” he asks, tone entirely playful.

Spock crosses the room in slow, measured paces – careful not to inflame his hangover any more than moving and breathing and living alone already does – until he’s standing directly in front of his brother and able to look down into his smiling, steadily purpling face. With faintly trembling hands, he takes the orange juice carton from Sybok, uncaps it, brings its mouth to his lips, and drinks from it until his throat tires.

When he breaks for air, wiping the moisture from his mouth with the back of his hand, Sybok is leaned fully against the back of the sofa and watching him with eyes full of love even despite the bruise he’s sure to have for at least two weeks and the hell they’re both living in on this particular morning. Spock puts his fingers on the older one’s face, tips tracing the edges of the translucent, wine-colored splotch spreading over the crest of Sybok’s right eye socket, and his voice is soft and wet from drinking when he murmurs, “Thank you.”

Sybok simply shows Spock his teeth again. “You’re very welcome, my young Padawan,” is his gentle reply, and Spock doesn’t doubt for a second that the man knows exactly what he’s being thanked for in just the same way he seems to know everything in the world that’s nebulous and abstract and extant between just the two of them.

It’s because of that that Spock cracks a smile as well – corners of his lips turning up just so, absolutely no thinking required.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please tell me what you think of sybok. spock too, honestly, but _sybok_.
> 
> comments, critiques, and questions are heavily encouraged and heartily welcomed.
> 
> \- gabi


	5. 004 THEIR LANGUAGE OF LOVE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bones gives Jim another one of his strange hybrid expressions at that – something glaring and smirking and lovingly shaking its head all at the same time – and it’s just as powerful even when transmitted over Jim’s frustratingly mediocre backwater WiFi connection and accentuated with the telltale rosy under-eye circles of an intensely sick person. “Where would I be without yer cheek, hm?”
> 
> Entertaining thoughts of kissing the air in the direction of his webcam, Jim settles with giving his ailing Georgian friend a fantastically impish wink. For them, this sort of back-and-forth, Ginsu-sharp banter is their _Français_ , _their language of love_.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this took like three million years because college kicked my ass to hell and back again? sorry about that.
> 
> (side note: i will respond to you, mavis!!! as soon as humanly possible!!! you're the best of the best, sweets.)

“I swear on my fucking life, the kid literally brought _methamphetamine_ into my house.”

Bones’ hybrid expression of shock and almost blasé displeasure is just a tad pixelated when blown up on the monitor of Jim’s laptop – eyebrows raised but not quite touching his forehead, hazel eyes widened ever so slightly. “And how exactly did he acquire this methamphetamine?”

“He never actually answered me when I asked him.” Jim pauses to pop an orange-shaped, -colored, and -flavored fruit snack into his mouth, then proceeds to keep talking even as he works the gummy between his molars. “He just said, ‘ _it’s harder to get cigarettes than it was to get this_ ’.”

“Whad’ya do?” His voice going suddenly tight at the end of the question, Bones coughs – the sound hacking and wet and muffled behind a fist – then – “With the meth, I mean.”

“Well…” Jim’s verbal hiatus is significantly longer this time, dominated primarily by him noisily fingering around in his aluminum pouch of fruit gummies and avoiding looking directly into Bones’ eyes (read: his webcam). He mentally waltzes around the ridiculously clear memory of chasing half a bottle of Desoxyn with fruit juice approximately forty-eight hours ago while he and his batshit insane coworker laid with their legs hanging out of his bedroom window and verbally marveled all the while at how astoundingly _electric_ everything had become under the influence of those tiny white pills – they must have said ‘ _holy shit_ ’ a minimum of thirteen times in the span of just as many minutes – but because he has a sneaking suspicion that divulging this experience to Bones would, in all likelihood, not go over very well at all, his reply is a markedly vague, “We got rid of it.”

Bones blinks, and Jim wonders how such a simple action could convey such deep, unadulterated judgement. “ _How_ ,” he says, the word not a question so much as a demand for an answer.

Under almost all circumstances, Jim would be at least moderately amused by the fact that Bones knows him well enough to anticipate his all-around ridiculousness before he’s even been made aware of exactly _how_ it’s happened to manifest in any given situation. Right now, though? It’s mostly just frustrating.

“Well, you know, we uh…” Jim reaches for his nape, scraping his fingernails through the short hairs there. “Disposed of it. Flushed it down.” A brief, muted cough. “With orange juice.”

Bones’ reaction is as immediate and as instinctive as Jim expected it to be. Almost _instantly_ , he’s sighing the loudest possible sigh a person could muster – the sound harsher and more grating than it would be in person when digitalized and going directly into Jim’s ears, courtesy of his _Star Wars_ headphones – and careening his eyeballs back into his head with the utmost level of irritation, his voice even thicker than usual with his trademark brand of Georgian disgust when he says, far past the threshold of scolding and now just outright _bitching_ , “God _dammit_ , Jim, d’you know what abusin’ that shit could do to you? Have you seen _pictures_ of people after they’ve been on meth? It ain’t pretty, man, ain’t pretty at _all_ –”

“It was only one time!” Jim emphasizes his admittedly half-hearted fervor with an emphatic shake of the hands, making his eyes the big, blue, distinctly princess-like oceans he often uses (with variable success) to illicit sympathy or mercy from Bones. “I’m not going to become an _addict_ –“

“Meth is highly addictive, Jim! It doesn’t matter if it was _just one time_ , ‘specially considering that yer crazy ass coworker might keep bringin’ it around!” Bones is waving his hands around like the crazy person Jim often suspects he is, so animated in his distress that accidentally hitting himself in the face isn’t quite a remote possibility (one that Jim is forced to hastily stifle a laugh at once it occurs to him). “Yer not even sixteen yet, you can’t be popping that shit like candy without some _serious_ consequences, I’m talkin’ _psychosis_ , _insomnia_ , _heart problems_ –“

Bones’ rant is prematurely ended by the sudden onset of a severe coughing fit – mucus breaking audibly in his throat and his desperate struggle for breath almost painfully clear in the harsh, thunderstorm sound coming out of him and the desperate quaking of his body. All at once, Jim forgets how exasperated he is with his friend’s compulsive mother henning, instead surrenders completely to the extreme pity that strikes him like a lightning bolt with every pained sound that comes out of the other.

“You’re all worried about me. Maybe you should pay more attention to _your_ health problems.”

Initially, Bones’ only response is a heavily crumpled expression – brow knotted like tree roots, lips twisted up into an impossible little frown. Then he says, “I think I just coughed up a fuckin’ kidney.”

“You’ve got four sisters.” Without even thinking fully of it, Jim lets the right corner of his mouth come upwards, fishes out another orange gummy to roll around on his tongue. “One of them’s bound to love you enough to lend you one.”

Bones gives Jim another one of his strange hybrid expressions at that – something glaring and smirking and lovingly shaking its head all at the same time – and it’s just as powerful even when transmitted over Jim’s frustratingly mediocre backwater WiFi connection and accentuated with the telltale rosy under-eye circles of an intensely sick person. “Where would I be without yer cheek, hm?”

Entertaining thoughts of kissing the air in the direction of his webcam, Jim settles with giving his ailing Georgian friend a fantastically impish _wink_. For them, this sort of back-and-forth, Ginsu-sharp banter is their _Français_ , their _language of love_.

* * *

 

On the night of this particular Skype call, it is Saturday, March 2nd in the year of our Lord 2013. Bones, obviously, is afflicted with a monster of a cold that he’s resorted to nursing with orange juice spiked with rum (which, honestly, takes a whole lot out of his lecture against substance abuse). Jim, on the other hand, is afflicted with a mountain of homework he frankly can’t be bothered with at the moment, likely won’t even _look at_ until eleven o’clock tomorrow night.

This has been their biweekly routine since they were brave and familiar enough to expose one another to the glory and splendor of each other’s voices and faces. They talk almost constantly via text messages and Skype IMs, of course – the vast majority of their relationship and all the things they know about each other has taken and still takes place in those arenas – but there’s something special and almost cathartic about voice-on-voice action when most of what they do is communicate as disembodied text, when the sheer amount of physical space between them feels like a cruel joke when held up against how close they’ve become.

When they talk on the phone, they aren’t in Riverside, Iowa and Athens, Georgia, eight-hundred and sixty miles away from each other. Instead, they exist in some cocoon-like parallel realm only accessible through the mystical power of their own unique voices and only available to the two of them. Science _is_ only decoded magic, after all.

* * *

 

“You know what I think about so much?”

“Hm?”

“The fact that in _Beauty and the Beast_ , the Beast’s castle is like, in the middle of the forest, right? And he’s supposed to be a prince, right?” Jim pauses to shake his hands in an exaggerated, temporarily wordless expression of ‘ _what the fuck?!_ ’, then – “What is he supposed to be the prince of? The _trees?!_ ”

For several moments, Bones doesn’t even visibly react to Jim’s question, just sniffs a whole lot and busies himself with something beyond the scope of his webcam, something Jim can’t see. Eventually, though, his hands appear holding a cough drop wrapped in lemon yellow paper and he’s scratching at the back of his head – further disheveling his already quite unruly hair – saying, “ _Beauty and the Beast_ took place in, what – the eighteenth century? S’not like France had jus’ gone over all its forests with buildings by that point.”

“I _know_ , but like…” Jim has to stop for a moment to collect and organize his thoughts as he’s often wont to, being afflicted with a mind as prone to racing as his is. He pushes his fingers against his lips – almost as if to force himself to _shut up and think_ for a second – then, once he’s sure how he actually wants to say it – “The Beast is royalty, and not just _any_ royalty, but a _prince_. So why is his palace so secluded and cut off from the people he presumably rules over? It doesn’t make sense.” Jim reaches a hand out to retrieve some oral entertainment of his own, shoving his fingers into his frankly _humongous_ bag of _Funyuns_ and eagerly hooking himself a couple, and as he does this, he realizes even _more_ just how strange the circumstances he’s talking about are, eyes widening into grand blue saucers behind his glasses when he says, “ _Also_ – why the fuck wasn’t anyone concerned when a _prince_ just dropped off the face of the Earth and sealed himself up in his castle and didn’t contact anyone outside for _years?_ ”

Bones narrows his eyes at the camera, quizzical. “Didn’t everyone else hate him because he was an asshole?”

“I don’t… think so? I think the witch or enchantress or whatever just showed up one day and decided to teach him a lesson, which, _uh_ – _why_ did she do that? Did she just wake up that morning like, ‘ _yeah, I’m gonna fuck up some selfish jackass’ life today, and that prince over there in that castle_ in the middle of nowhere _seems like a good target_ ’? ‘ _I’ve been feeling really_ Old Testament _lately, so I’m just gonna make myself ugly and revenge-curse the first shallow royal I find_ ’? Like, what was her plan?”

Bones’ expression warps briefly with stifled amusement, brows knitting together and lips wrestling with a smile – he asks, “S’it bad that I just thought of T’Pring?”

Jim has to fight, _hard_ , not to just _explode_ with the most vindictive sort of laughter there is right then and there – especially when a soft, feminine voice weakly pleads, “ _Stop!_ ” in the background of Bones’ call. Instead, he barrels right on with his tangent after only a beat of tight-lipped hesitation, says, “There’s also the fact that he’s a _prince_ and not a _king_ , so like, why wasn’t he living with his parents? Did the king and queen _die_ , or did they get turned into a grandfather clock and a vanity or something?”

Bones hacks a few times against his fist, shoulders shaking bodily with the effort. Sniffling wetly and wiping at the snot having run from his nose with the heel of his hand – something Jim isn’t actually able to perceive on his computer monitor, but definitely knows is there – the older one’s voice is the strained thing it becomes post-coughing fit when he asks, probably rhetorically, “Didn’t we agree you weren’t gonna poke holes in Disney movies anymore?”

“I can’t help it!” Jim whines around a mouthful of onion-flavored corn chips. “Hole-poking is in my genetic code!”

“Is eatin’ like a pig _also_ in your genetic code?” Bones retorts without missing a beat – something about his Southern heritage and constant anger that makes him an expert at roasting anyone and everyone at the drop of a hat. “’Cause I’ve watched you go through like ten tiny bags of fruit snacks, two bowls of cookie dough ice cream, a _Lunchable_ , and what’s that – _Funyuns?_ – in the course of the past hour and a half alone.”

“You’re just mad because _you’re_ sick and have no appetite.” Jim punctuates the sentence with a pointed _crunch_ of one particularly large _Funyun_. “Watch – as soon as you get better, you’ll be eating your own body weight right along with me.”

“ _As soon as he gets better?_ ” Jim hears the female speaker several seconds before he actually sees her, before she’s appearing at Bones’ side and getting open looks of betrayal and glee from Bones and Jim, respectively. She easily nestles into the space beside Bones on his quilt-laden bed, bringing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her arms around them as she snorts, “He’s eating like a horse. Don’t listen to him, Jim.”

“ _Ohhhh!_ ” Jim makes a grand show of raising his arms and stabbing the air with both index fingers, jerking his body in a jubilant, incredibly bouncy side-to-side motion. “Roasted by your own girlfriend – you’ve truly made it in life. Can I do it too, Chris? Let’s talk shit about the fact that he literally has a Motorola _Razr_ because he’s afraid of the government spying on him through a smartphone.”

Chris – otherwise and more popularly known as _Chapel_ among their collective friend group – has been planning for months to take a train from her hometown of Concord, Massachusetts to Bones’ humble abode to share a couple of days with her long distance love, his unanticipated illness notwithstanding. Under almost all circumstances, she, being the amazingly conscientious college student she is, wouldn’t take off in the middle of a semester to cuddle and canoodle with her boyfriend, but with today being the nineteenth anniversary of her birth and all, it’s safe to say she felt a little less guilty about treating herself than she would otherwise.

“What about the fact that he talks in his sleep?” Chapel reaches off-camera to grab her phone and makes quick work of unlocking the device, illuminated features the picture of quiet amusement. “I started writing down some of the things he was saying last night, hold on.”

Bones narrows his eyes at the young woman squished up against his side, nose wrinkling with disdain. “I will sneeze on you,” he threatens, and his tone might actually be kind of menacing if it wasn’t so hilariously _nasal_.

Chapel stops thumbing around on her smartphone’s screen to give her boyfriend a skeptical look, all raised brows and pursed lips. “You’re not that spiteful.”

There’s a moment where no one – not even Jim – moves or says or does anything but breathe. Then, without absolutely _any_ further ado, Bones sticks his face in the place between Chapel’s bicep and right breast and lets out a sneeze so physically violent it actually _shakes_ the bed, judging by the jostling of the webcam shot and the dull sound of the headboard rattling against the wall. Immediately, Chapel is assaulting Bones with a flurry of smacks and whacks against the back, shoulder, and head, and just as instantaneously, Jim is just _exploding_ with laughter, shoving his mouth into the inside of his elbow so he doesn’t yell the rest of the house awake with his crazy elephant noises.

“You’re terrible!” Chapel cries, grabbing Bones by the jowls and yanking his face this way and that when he raises his head to grin, wolfish and just too pleased, at her. “I’m not kissing you for the rest of my trip if I wake up sick tomorrow.”

“Yeah, ‘cause me sneezin’ on you would have gotten you sick when you sharin’ this bed with me hasn’t,” Bones quips, somehow managing to be both impish and matter-of-fact in unison.

“Oh my _God_ , guys, y’all are my favorite.” Jim clasps his hands over his chest, makes a quiet, tender sound like ‘ _guh_ ’. “Please kiss right now, so my soul can leave my body and I can die happily.”

“You are about the most romantic fifteen-going on-sixteen boy I’ve ever met,” Chapel remarks, shaking her head in a most amused and bewildered fashion, but despite her earlier statement and despite her obvious displeasure with the snot that’s most likely _all over_ her bicep, she hooks an arm around Bones’ head and brings his crown over to drop a soft kiss on, fingers pushing gently through his tangled hair and brushing along his temple.

Bones, for his part, looks the kind of over-the-moon _pleased_ he nearly only ever gets when he’s with, talking about, or simply thinking about Chapel – dimples deep and more than visible, the twinkle in his eye apparent even with the almost subpar picture quality Jim’s getting. It’s a little strange and maybe even kind of pathetic, but Jim feels happier than he has in weeks just being able to see the two of them like this, just being friends with people he adores as much as he does them, the miles between them as many and as painful as they are.

* * *

 

Their relationship took on an entirely different dimension when they’d heard and seen each other for the first time.

Jim recalls being eleven and staying up until the wee hours roleplaying _Star Trek_ and _Buffy_ and _Supernatural_ with Bones on Chatango, recalls imagining him then with the gruff, gravelly voice of DeForest Kelley as it was in the late sixties. It was a strange notion to keep, what with Bones having been a thirteen year-old boy at the time, but Jim just couldn’t manage to shake it off after he’d learned his real name and started seeing him as the modern-day avatar of Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, just several decades younger and perhaps even _more_ hotheaded than the original.

He’d also always imagined him in blue after he’d first seen his Facebook profile picture – a webcam snapshot in which _yes_ , he _was_ wearing a cerulean t-shirt with the _Superman_ emblem on it. Any time, any day, Bones was wearing a blue shirt in the eye of Jim’s mind, and he drank ginger ale constantly and perpetually frowned and never slept – not even on weekends when it was more socially acceptable to do so – and it wasn’t until they’d conducted their first Skype video call a year after having known each other that all of these silly, ridiculously entrenched ideas began to crumble like old cheese.

Bones, in fact, wore many other colors besides _cerulean blue_.

Bones enjoyed drinking ginger ale, but he also liked iced tea and root beer and, quite possibly more than anything else, chocolate milkshakes.

Bones’ favorite expression might have been frowning, but it wasn’t his only one. He smirked a lot, too – usually some kind of derisively – and whenever Jim said something not just _kind of_ funny, but _super_ funny, he laughed with his eyes, nose and cheeks just as much as with his lips, teeth, and tongue.

Bones slept just as much as any other human being, and he did _not_ have the voice of DeForest Kelley – he had the voice of exactly what he was: a fourteen year-old from Northeastern Georgia who’d already gone through his embarrassing voice-cracking period and was just beginning to sprout facial hair.

There comes a point in almost every relationship where two people stop traveling along the same mythical paths predetermined by society and common courtesy alike and start becoming _real_. For Jim Kirk and Leo McCoy, that point arrived on the night they first said ‘ _hello_ ’ to each other with their own voices, and smiled, and laughed at the notion that then was the beginning of their first _true_ conversation, despite them having known so much about each other already.

“Your shirt is gray,” Jim had marveled, chuckling, more to himself than to Bones.

Bones’ face had scrunched all up like crumpled paper. “Well, _duh_.” And then, smirking one of the many smirks Jim would learn and memorize in the years to come, the one that conveyed nothing but sharp amusement – “Your shirt is red.” A nod towards his webcam. “Your turn again.”

For the next five minutes, they recounted all manner of obvious (and not-so-obvious) things about each other until the exercise had grown at once too boring and too comical to continue, and it hadn’t been very apparent then, but that was the moment they’d started knowing each other as _actual people_ instead of the collection of attributes and interests they’d been before. And it was really nice.

* * *

 

“I wouldn’t worry about him.”

A moderately loud sigh is offered in reply.

“M’serious. Don’t sweat it. He’ll probably just emotionally repress like he does with everythin’ else and move on with his life. Start worryin’ when he’s twenty-five and he’s racked up enough bottled-up emotional trauma to snap and start killin’ people and dumpin’ their bodies in abandoned subways.”

Jim, mostly content with lying on his back with his arm slung up and across his face, breaks his position of palpable misery to squint up into his webcam – partially because he needs to communicate just how _done_ he is with Bones’ reasoning, partially because his eyes just automatically go into _Mr. Magoo_ mode whenever his face is bereft of glasses. “That’s… _macabre_.”

“Literary prodigy ten-dollar word.” Bones takes a long sip from his _Lord of the Rings_ mug, makes a pleased, warm noise in the back of his throat. “You know the way he is about every ugly emotion he ever experiences. Plus, all’t does is bother him when you worry about him, so _don’t_.”

“It’s not like I can just turn it off like flipping a switch,” Jim bitches in a tone that’s only moderately whiny, pressing his hands to his face with the vague intent of screaming briefly into them and just barely keeping himself from following the urge out. “And this isn’t him being pissed off at his dickhead dad, it’s his first breakup _ever_.”

“People move on.”

“ _Spock_ isn’t _people_.” He’s talking into his hands, but loudly and clearly enough to be heard in all his low-key panic and obstinacy. “Spock is a person with Asperger’s syndrome who’s freaky about attachment and can’t handle negative feelings and probably almost _cried_ on the phone with me last month.”

“It’s been a month, Jim.” Bones’ voice is abruptly hollow when he raises his mug back to his lips and starts speaking into it, words echoing coldly off of its inner ceramic walls. “You’d think havin’ spent thirty-one days in a row with yer ex would desensitize you to all yer pain and sufferin’–“

“ _Leo_ , it’s–” Jim cuts himself off, sitting up so suddenly he might send himself into a mild dizzy spell. His eyes are closed, his breath is coming deep and deliberate, and there’s a pretty little song in his heart that goes something like _please just get it, you dick_ as he says, just as earnestly as he says so many things, “I know it’s easy for you to be, like, super generalizing about Spock because you’ve never really talked to him like I have, but…” He swallows, opens his eyes only to stare down into the sapphire blue mesh folds in his lap, the white _Earthbound_ logo set against the black cotton plane of his t-shirt. “I think there’s something seriously wrong.” Then, much more quietly – “He’s not the same.”

Something about Jim’s tone – its softness, maybe, or the way it fits itself all panicky and resigned around the words ‘ _he’s not the same_ ’ – must reach Bones the way Jim’s open alarm didn’t, because his expression goes from flippant to entirely sympathetic and sorry in its wake, the pixels on Jim’s screen rearranging themselves accordingly.

“Jim…” He trails off, obviously uncertain, to lean over and set his mug down somewhere off-camera, ceramic clunking faintly yet still audibly against wood somewhere in the background. “Y’know, everybody goes through shit like this. And everybody somehow gets through it.”

“That’s a lie,” Jim blurts without thinking – not meanly, just very bluntly.

“Okay, _yeah_ , like one out of every one-hundred, two-hundred people in the world don’t get through it and do somethin’ crazy like off themselves or their ex. But Spock is strong.” Bones abruptly coughs, grabs his mug again to take a quick, relieving drag from it, then says, words flowing smoother, “And he’s got you, right? Dunno how anyone with Jim Kirk in their life could stay miserable about anythin’ for long.”

Jim has known for a long time (three years, nine months, and one week, to be exact) about Bones’ primal aversion if not outright inability to say sorry for anything. He knows that this – this roundabout compliment – is the closest thing to an apology he’s going to get out of him. He knows expecting anything more is just asking for disappointment.

So he lies back down, releases a long breath, and says, “Let’s just hope you’re right about my magical happiness powers. What – am I like Sailor Moon or something?”

Bones nods, affirmative. “With the big blue eyes, hair buns and everything.”

Smiling up at his old, slightly stained popcorn ceiling, Jim brings his hands up to twist his too-short, dirty blond hair into two tiny buns wrapped tight around his fingers. He sends a short, nothing little laugh upwards into the air like releasing a balloon, and Bones sends back a soft, amused snort – auditory confetti.

* * *

 

They’d known each other for three years when it occurred to Jim for the first time that Bones was, in all likelihood, his best friend.

The thing he’s had and been growing with Spock is a different creature – it’s covered in rosebuds and glitter gel, purrs softly when touched, glows brightly in the dark, and just may be the prettiest and most exciting thing Jim’s ever encountered. Their thing makes the inside of Jim’s skin all tingly and warm and is loud and freaky and beautiful like a ThunderCat; it’s weird, it’s exhilarating, it’s the coolest thing this poor kid from Bumfuck, Iowa has ever experienced.

The thing between him and Bones, though – it’s Optimus Prime rooted to the ground by greedy vines and overgrowth, with salt stones for eyes and thick gashes in his metal skin from a whole lifetime of fighting. They have an overabundance of vegetation and protective armor; they have the potential to transform layered over with time, rust, and earth.

It was a year and a half ago. Jim was fourteen, Bones sixteen, and they’d sat outside on their porches in Riverside and Athens and watched the sun rise while discussing the trials and tribulations of puberty and living as a human being on planet Earth in general – “What kind of fucked up karma did I get ‘n my last life, huh?” Bones had said, and Jim had laughed the snorting, ugly laugh he only emitted when he was really and truly tired, twenty-two hours without sleep _tired_.

When the sun finally breached the horizon on Jim’s tiny strip of the globe – him in Iowa being one hour behind Bones in Georgia – he told Bones, “There it is! Oh my _God_ , there it is,” and Bones had all but sighed, “S’pretty, idn’t?” – and Jim couldn’t help but remember a time when he and Sam waited on the front porch for the sun, barefoot and loquacious as he and Bones were then. He recalled his older brother once being his _best friend_ : the person he confided everything in and who made him laugh easier than just about anyone, the only person who’d seen and heard him cry save for their parents, the person he’d talked to well into the night until Mama Kirk came in and told them both to can it for the evening – “I’m sure this conversation will be just as riveting in the morning as it is now, boys.”

On that morning, though, watching the sun climb painstakingly slowly up the ladder of the sky, Sam wasn’t _there_ – wasn’t with Jim on the porch and wasn’t with Jim in _life_ – even as he slept on the other side of Jim’s wall and saw him on a daily basis.

Jim realized then that Bones had stepped in where Sam had stepped out. He didn’t fit the mold perfectly – Bones’ edges weren’t quite as sharp as Sam’s, and he’d never held Jim when he was a baby, and he’d never played at indoor camping or cooking superheroes or any of the crazy games Jim and Sam had invented since the day Jim came struggling ass-first out of Mama Kirk’s womb – but he sat in it nonetheless, cursing like a sailor over the phone and being so close while living a thousand miles away.

“Hey, Leo?”

“Hm?”

“You’re my best friend, you know that?”

Bones’ response wasn’t immediate; Jim could almost physically _feel_ him trying to process the sheer force of all that sentimentality over the phone – a sucker punch in force but a Hershey kiss in sweetness. When he did speak, he said, “Let’s not get _too_ gay, yeah? S’not like we just watched the sun rise together or anythin’…”

To anyone else, it would have sounded like a rejection. To Jim, it was Bones’ incredibly gruff, incredibly oblique way of saying ‘ _ditto_ ’.

* * *

 

“ _Alright_ , Jimmy T. S’about time I dragged this old bag o’ bones to bed.”

“You’ve been in bed the entire time we’ve been on the phone.” Jim says it in his typically cheeky and willful way, smirking like an imp into his laptop’s webcam.

“I’ve been _dying_ the entire time we’ve been on the phone,” Bones retorts with an unpleasant, uncomfortably sick-sounding snort. “I just finished my _third_ hot toddy, so I’m probably drunk–”

“You can’t tell?” Jim affects a lightly horrified expression. “ _Yikes_.”

“And _this one_ –” Bones gestures off-camera to Chapel, barreling on as if Jim hadn’t interrupted him at all. “– jus’ made a face at me that tells me it’s time to go to sleep.”

Jim takes great pleasure in executing the universal hand motion/sound effect combination for _pussy-whipped_ – cracking an imaginary switch at the camera and making a sharp hissing noise between his teeth, struggling in vain not to smirk all the while. Bones – inebriated and undeniably in love – isn’t very touched by his ridicule.

“ _Yeah, yeah_. I’m gonna go decompress my skull and hit the hay.”

“Not too hard, I hope.”

Bones gives Jim a soft, sleepy little smile. “What’m I gonna do with you?”

“Love me and obey my every whim?” Wouldn’t you know that Jim’s giving him that very same smile in return?

“Behave yourself.” Just as Bones raises a hand to wave Jim off into the night, Chapel appears at his right shoulder, flaxen hair pulled back into a loose, fledgling ponytail and face devoid of all adornments. In unison, Jim’s favorite lovebirds bid him, “ _Goodnight, goodnight_ ,” with a couple of air kisses thrown into the mix by Chapel and a simple two-finger salute given to him by Bones.

“Night, guys!” Jim presses kissed fingertips against his webcam, grinning like a fool. “Happy birthday, Chris!”

The last thing Jim gets is a rushed, gleeful ‘ _thank you_ ’ from Chapel before the Skype call ends; duration: three hours, forty-nine minutes, and thirteen seconds. Feeling sated and perhaps a tad awed – the way he _always_ feels after getting off of the phone with Bones – Jim casts his gaze out of the window to his right, traces it up from the familiar broad, empty cornfields to the tiny stars that speckle the sky.

He releases a long breath – quiet, calm. He’ll go to sleep soon – he needs to, after the positively shitty school week he’s been through – but for now, he’ll just bask for a little while.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> the end of this was written kind of haphazardly and i haven't gotten around to editing it yet, so some things (i.e.: wording) may change within the next week or so. shouldn't be too big a deal, though.
> 
> comments, critiques, and questions are heavily encouraged and heartily welcomed.
> 
> \- gabi


	6. 005 GALAXY COMICS: THE PEOPLE: THE LIFE: THE LEGACY

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A minute passes in relative silence and sameness. Jim solves questions eleven and twelve of his worksheet. Pike putters around in his office, rotating the plants on the windowsill and examining the return addresses of several of the packages on his desk. Gary carries on with his moderately convincing charade of productivity. Superbear holds vigil over them all, Paul McCartney sings somewhere beyond the ceiling, and the Death Star _ticks_ quietly with every passing second.
> 
> This is all par for the course.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i set out writing this thinking that my overwhelming love for it and all of the things it represents would automatically make for relatively fast updates and magically override the fact that i'm very much a mentally ill college student.
> 
> i was wrong. i'm very sorry.
> 
> i've read over this several times over the course of writing it and _still_ in some way think it needs cleaning up, but if it were up to me, i'd probably edit forever. so, i'm just going to post it as is; let me know if you pick out something wonky.
> 
> also!! a thematically/aesthetically relevant song for this chapter is 'take a chance on me' by abba. look it up. listen to it. jam out. feel things.

**Monday, March 11, 2013  
** **3:28 PM**

 ** _INT_** _: GALAXY COMICS_. Covered wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling in graphic novels, comic books, and geek paraphernalia of almost every conceivable sort – glossily packaged action figures; posters rolled up into tubes and wrapped in clear cellophane; glass cases and bins overflowing with kitschy video game and comic book keychains and lanyards; cheap plastic bobbleheads all stamped with _MADE IN CHINA_ in microscopic letters on the bottom; multicolored jelly bands emblazoned with the logos and insignias of every major comic book superhero currently on the market; 100-, 500-, and 1,000-piece puzzles depicting _Earth’s Mightiest Heroes_ and the _Justice League of America_ ; and, perhaps most notably, a _TEDDY BEAR_ the size of a four year-old dressed in full Superman regalia and perched watchfully among the cluster of primary-colored beanbags in the back right corner of the shop – the small strip-mall store is a welcoming haven for Iowa City’s hardcore aficionados and casual comics perusers alike. Currently, the shop is seemingly devoid of all human life and activity; the only sounds to be heard within are those of the classic rock music streaming softly from the overhead speakers and the steady _ticking_ of the Death Star clock posted up in the center of the store’s back wall – a ticking just barely perceptible over the tinny-yet-groovy guitar noises filtering out of the ceiling.

 _Enter JIM KIRK_. All but fluorescent in his oversized, firetruck red Shazam hoodie, Jim walks into _Galaxy Comics_ on time and with two minutes to spare, his entrance heralded by the automated door chime designed to sound like the iconic, instantly recognizable bosun’s whistle from _Star Trek_ ’s original series. Adjusting the considerable weight of his backpack with a quick jerking-bouncing motion, our young hero makes his way for _PIKE’S OFFICE DOOR_ – sequestered off near the back left corner of the store and partially hidden behind a plethora of posters and comic book clippings – and on his way there, he surveys the unnerving emptiness of the store – no customers nor coworkers in sight.

Jim prefaces his entry with a tripartite knock before gingerly opening the door and stepping inside the office, where _CHRISTOPHER PIKE_ sits behind a desk piled high with multicolored manila folders, both opened and unopened packages and letters, and a frankly endearing number of photographs of his wife, three dogs, and two cats. Pike is on the phone – an honest to God _black rotary phone_ , bless his overly sentimental soul – so instead of launching into his typical spiel of ‘ _hey hi hello_ ’ and ‘ _how are you?_ ’ and ‘ _you’ll never believe what happened today_ ’, Jim settles with giving the man a bright, wordless smile and beelining straight for the colossal bookshelf against the left-hand wall, the one lined with statuettes, knick-knacks, an overabundance of office supplies, and quite a few multi-colored and -labeled letter trays.

“When did he call you?” A brief pause, then Pike makes a soft, scoffing noise – _tch!_ – into the phone. “Of course. Because Lord knows you wouldn’t have wanted to know as soon as it happened.”

Trailing his fingers briefly over the nose of the brass Minnie Mouse figurine on the third shelf from the bottom, Jim grabs from a red letter tray his personal file – the garish, rainbow-colored two-pocket folder that contains all documents relevant to his employment at _Galaxy_ , namely: his W-4, his job application, a two-page printout of workplace rules and guidelines, and his timesheet. The latter item is the one he happens to be looking for.

“You’re kidding me. It’s not that I don’t believe you, I _do_ , it’s just – that cat is a senior citizen! How in the hell did our goddamned geriatric ass cat end up two and a half blocks down all the way on Pentire?”

Jim carefully retrieves his timesheet from his folder, places it on top of said folder for support, then goes in search of a pen on Pike’s grand mess of a desk. The pencil holder would normally afford him at least three different pens to choose from, but at the moment, the only things to be found there are two blue Sharpies and a Ticonderoga pencil that’s been whittled down to about a fourth of its original size. Jim pouts at it, silently willing it – the pencil, the pencil holder, the desk as a whole – to feel the acuteness of his poverty.

“We’ll have to send him a bottle of wine. Oh, he is?” Pike bares his teeth in the universal facial expression of ‘ _yikes_ ’. “Didn’t know that. Sparkling grape juice, then?”

Feeling industrious, Jim decides not to settle for a midget pencil and instead renews his quest for a pen with vigor. He scans Pike’s desktop as thoroughly as he possibly can without being too conspicuous or overly bothersome, then – finding bupkes – heads back for the bookshelf, tucking his folder and timesheet under one arm while he peruses the boxes and bins of office supplies for a package of Bics or something similar. From what he can initially tell, there are rolls of scotch tape and reams of copy paper like nobody’s business, but the ever-elusive writing utensils he desires are either _a)_ hiding to spite him, or _b)_ nonexistent. Would it be so terrible if he just went out into the showroom, grabbed one of the Avengers pen packs for sale, and called it a day?

“I’m not making a joke! I can’t be blamed for the fact that my voice naturally sounds like this.” A blustery, laughing sort of noise comes out of Pike. “What’s that, you say? My _full of shit-sounding voice?_ ”

It’s all Jim can do to not launch into one of his many extravagant victory dances when lo and behold, on the very bottom shelf is a plastic pencil case the likes of which he and his fellow tiny tots used to tote around in elementary school, absolutely _full_ of ballpoint pens of every shape, size, and color. Instead of giving in to sweet, drugging ridiculousness, though, Jim contents himself with punching the air and emitting a near-silent cry of ‘ _hell yes!_ ’, grinning like a fool as he takes the point of a glittery orange gel pen to his timesheet and scribbles _3:30_ into the _TIME IN_ slot for Monday of the current week.

Then it’s going to get Pike’s confirmatory initials on his arrival time. The man is laughing his characteristic, thunder-and-honey laugh into the receiver of the phone when Jim comes over with his folder, mutely holding it and his uncapped pen out for him to take. “I thought that’s what you liked about me when we first met–” Pike’s face shuffles rapid-fire through several expressions once he registers Jim’s waiting presence: twinned acknowledgement and realization, amusement at whatever words are coming through his phone’s plastic earpiece, something mostly neutral as he reaches for both folder and pen, followed quickly by obvious bewilderment at the vibrant, sparkling ink of Jim’s pen of choice. “You did _so_. You thought I was _dashing_.” A pause as Pike initials beside Jim’s messy, right-leaning ‘ _3:30_ ’. “Embellishment isn’t a crime, dear.” He hands the folder and pen back to Jim. “And you’d be more than right.”

As Jim moves to file his folder back away in its proper place in the red file tray on the colossal bookshelf, he listens to Pike wrap up his conversation with who he’d safely bet large sums of money is his wife – an inky-haired, azure-eyed beauty Jim hasn’t actually met yet, but knows comically well, how much Pike talks about her. “Well, darlin’, I gotta go. I still haven’t made a dent in this avalanche of mail, I got kids to watch – my whole world is falling apart. Of course. I love you, too – bye.” And then there’s the distinct _click_ of the phone hitting its housing and Pike leaning back in his swivel chair with a sigh three parts dreamy, one part weary – just in time for Jim to turn around and lock eyes with him, expectant.

Employer and employee stare each other down – Pike looking pleasant and satisfied, Jim looking just a tad amused.

“Hey, kid.”

“Hey, boss.”

“What’s up? How’s your mom?”

“She’s alright.” She yelled at him, an absent Frank, three of their four cats, and the stubborn scuff marks on the kitchen floor for fifteen minutes straight this morning in a bout of manic rage, but aside from this minor and relatively normal blip, _alright_ is definitely the word.

“How was school?”

“Gross, as usual.”

Pike’s admittedly kind of weird response is to swipe a finger swiftly across his throat and stick his tongue out with a low, vaguely choke-y sound of disgust. The man is borderline _strange_ , Jim has only recently come to find, and that’s way up there on the list of reasons why he’s his number one, all-time, _favorite_ adult in the world. “Sorry to hear that, kid.”

Jim shrugs, noncommittal, far too used to all aspects of his life hitting around five or six on the Suck Meter to get weepy about it at this point. Fidgeting as he so often does with the cuff of his hoodie where it collects in his palm, he fixes his employer with an open, inquisitive look and asks, “Did Gary not come in today?”

The question vexes Pike more than Jim initially understands; narrowing his steely eyes, hand curling into an irritated fist on his desktop, the man is almost instantly rising out of his swivel chair and Jim is just as instantly cowering backwards into the bookshelf – partially out of the automatic, instinctual urge to run and hide, partially in order to give Pike room to pass him on his way around the desk and towards the door.

“That damn boy wasn’t at the front desk?” Pike asks – more to the invisible, omnipresent man in the room than to Jim – and then, with his hand tight around the doorknob, rolls his eyes and exhales like some tired old king into the air above him. “What the hell am I saying? Of _course_ he wasn’t.”

Jim feels more than a tad silly, shivering with his tail between his legs in the nearly nonexistent crevice between Pike’s bookshelf and the window, heart drumming a funny little beat against his ribcage. He tells himself repeatedly that he was and is perfectly aware of Pike’s utter lack of ill will and harmful intentions towards him and – silently and mostly straight-facedly laughing off the absolute joke of a heart attack he damn near had – follows his boss out of the office and to the _BREAK ROOM_ , where Gary presumably hides, slacks off, and generally sucks dick at doing his job.

Lo and behold, it’s the Workless Wonder himself – _GARY MITCHELL_ , lounging feet up, head down on the butt ugly red plaid couch Pike has set up in the break room. At the moment, an open bag of sour cream and onion-flavored _Lays_ is perched precariously on the teen’s stomach while he thumbs indolent as ever at his constant companion – his _iPhone_ – with his head hung hazardously over the edge of left sofa cushion.

Needless to say, Pike is not at all impressed.

“Having fun, Mitchell?” There’s a tightly restrained anger in the man’s voice that injects another quick hit of fearful adrenaline into Jim’s system, mindful as he is of the fact that it isn’t directed at him, not even a little.

Gary doesn’t stir an inch in reply, doesn’t even so much as tear his eyes away from his phone’s glowing touchscreen to look at his employer. The only moving part of his body in the wake of Pike’s question is his invariably smart mouth, which says – with all the boredom and brazenness that Jim has come to learn is, in all likelihood, intrinsic to the kid on some genetic, molecular level (his _carbon_ atoms are sassy, always mouthing off to the hydrogens) – “A regular blast, thanks.”

There’s a long moment then where Jim can see Pike calling upon some higher religious power – for help, for strength, for serenity, quite possibly all three in increasingly higher concentrations – gazing up at the ceiling with his fingers grasping his hips for dear life, the muscles in his arms tense and bulging under his tanned, weathered skin, his lips pressed together so hard they actually turn _white_. The strained, pious look on his face reminds Jim rather frightfully of certain depictions of Christ on the cross – with his eyes cast heavenward and so full of pain they’re almost physically _unbearable_ to look upon – and his voice is so carefully calm it’s almost _terrifying_ when he says, “I’m gonna give you five minutes to get up and get back to work.” He checks his watch. ”If you’re not in that showroom at 3:37, you’re fired.”

It would be a truly impressive display of authority and vaguely paternal dominance, to anyone that exists outside of the crazy microcosm that is _Galaxy Comics_. To the three of them, though – Captain Pike and Lieutenants Kirk and Mitchell – it’s more of the same threatening refrain that will play out at least once a week in this very room – usually on a Monday, but every now and again on a Thursday – and Gary will never get fired because he will always turn up in the showroom with mere seconds to spare and spend two minutes acting like he’s being useful by loitering purposefully near the indie comics and rearranging them every so often before resuming his previous activity of doing absolutely _nothing_ while Jim responsibly mans the front desk and Pike sequesters himself in his office to tend to paperwork, make phone calls, and intermittently play FreeCell on his PC, and life will go on much the same way it always does and this momentary blip in the order of things will pass away into oblivion only to be recalled sometime in the following week when Pike yet again finds Gary being a lazy jackass in the break room again and assumes his _Stern, Serious, and Not Fucking Around_ guise once more. Such is the manner of things on the _USS Galaxy_.

Gary travels his gaze backwards until it lands on Pike (and Jim, where he lingers silently behind him). “3:37,” he echoes, gives the man an inverted thumbs-up. “Gotcha.”

With that, Pike is turning on his heel and walking out of the break room, throwing an ominous, “ _Five minutes!_ ” over his shoulder on his way out.

“ _Cinco minutos!_ ” Gary parrots, mocking, crunching around a mouthful of green-speckled chips.

Jim takes a minute or so to take off his backpack – removing from it his civics textbook, his _X-Men_ notebook, and the geometry worksheet he’d already begun working on in the truck on the way here – before tossing it inside one of the cubbies Pike installed precisely for its housing and stripping off his hoodie to expose the _Galaxy_ t-shirt that counts as both his uniform and (probably) his very favorite item of clothing. All the while, Gary remains exactly where he is sprawled all over the couch, noisily eating his chips and swiping the pad of his thumb across his smartphone’s marginally greasy touchscreen.

Tucking his homework beneath one arm and using the other to check his own phone, Jim informs his coworker that, “It’s 3:34,” as he makes his way for the showroom and his customary post at the front desk.

Not looking at him, Gary holds up three salty fingers for all of two seconds. He then burrows those same fingers into his bag of _Lays_ and extracts a single potato chip, which he promptly stuffs into his mouth and crushes to bits between his molars and canines.

Questions eleven through sixteen of Jim’s geometry worksheet prove slightly harder than our young hero anticipated. _SOHCAHTOA_ is easy enough to remember, but the identities of each reciprocal function are a bit more elusive than Jim, with his typically crystalline memory, thought they would be while taking notes (read: doodling in the margins of his notebook) earlier today in class. Was it the _secant_ that Anderson said was the reciprocal of _sine_? Or was that the _cosecant_ , which seems much more likely to pair with _cosine_ based on name alone? One would think the great mathematicians of the past would have decided on terms that matched one another more easily out of kindness towards future generations of budding geometers, but if Jim has learned anything since his first day in Mr. Anderson’s geometry class, it’s that Euclid, Pythagoras, Descartes, all of them – they were _assholes_ , and they probably prided themselves greatly in their rampant assholery.

Jim is just about to pull his phone out and consult the Oracle – or, as most people refer to it, the Internet – for answers when Gary emerges from the break room with a crinkling aluminum bag in his right hand and his iPhone in his left. Literal _seconds_ later – crumpled chip bag bouncing off of the rim of the trash can in the back before diving on inside with a nearly noiseless _swish_ – Pike’s office door comes office open and the man is poking his salt-and-pepper head out into the showroom, taking stock: Jim in the red folding chair at the desk, using the pen with the Yoda head topper; Gary standing in the rear right corner of the shop, arranging various issues of _Saga_ and _The Walking Dead_ so that they fill out a whole shelf rather than sit awkwardly at both far ends; Superbear chilling with the beanbags, wearing his huge plastic Wayfarers and sitting a quick second out from saving the world.

“Mnh.” Pike nods appreciatively and then retreats back into his office. He doesn’t close the door completely – just leaves the barest sliver of nothing between it and the frame.

A minute passes in relative silence and sameness. Jim solves questions eleven and twelve of his worksheet. Pike putters around in his office, rotating the plants on the windowsill and examining the return addresses of several of the packages on his desk. Gary carries on with his moderately convincing charade of productivity. Superbear holds vigil over them all, Paul McCartney sings somewhere beyond the ceiling, and the Death Star _ticks_ quietly with every passing second.

This is all par for the course.

Then, at 3:39, Gary – having put the finishing touches on his little project – drops into the blue beanbag with an audible _hiss_ , silicon beans murmuring in protest as they shift around to accommodate his weight. When Jim glances up from his homework, he does so just in time to catch Gary throwing an arm around Superbear’s plushy shoulders and leaning his head back against a row of _Naruto_ volumes, legs stretched straight out in front of him and eyes very calmly closed.

“And so young Gareth dodges unemployment once again,” the teen quips, so damn smugly Jim can’t decide whether he wants to laugh or roll his eyes. “Tune in for next week’s riveting installment of _Galaxy Comics: The People: The Life: The Legacy_.”

Oh, to hell with it. Jim indulges himself in a little of both – casts his eyes towards the ceiling, lets a laugh rock and roll in the upper regions of his chest, where it feels the nicest and the warmest.

 

* * *

 

 **Tuesday, March 12, 2013  
** **4:16 PM**

 ** _INT_** _: GALAXY COMICS_. The afternoon hasn’t begun to die quite yet, hasn’t yet gathered enough downward momentum to begin its true descent into evening and then night, but it’s just close enough to 5:00 for the sun to perch just atop the hills of Iowa City and gaze directly into the floor-to-ceiling windows in _Galaxy_ ’s storefront, paint the interior of the shop in warm colors and playfully blind the poor people inside if they stand anywhere along the far right side of the showroom.

 _Yes, bitch!_ , that all-important, life-giving death orb seems to cackle in its typically obnoxious, bright, and almost painfully present way. _Feel the burn in those pretty little retinas – feel it!_

Posted up at his station behind the front desk – far out of the way of the cheery death rays of the sun, fortunately – is _JIM KIRK_ , ringing up a thin, shiny stack of comic issues that span an embarrassingly incongruent set of places, timelines, and characters in the Marvel Universe and exercising the very muscle his employer assigned him cashier duty to flex: the _charismatic_ one, the one that smiles like summertime, dazzles like diamonds, and makes women want to pinch his freckled cheeks, men want to talk hard philosophy, _Star Wars_ , and the Golden Age of Comic Books with him for five minutes at minimum. Awkward and relatively friendless he may be, but what our young hero lacks in social comfort, he makes up for in _spades_ with intrinsic, uncanny social charm – something _all_ Kirks came prepackaged with since their very first days of humanhood.

“Would you like a bag?”

“Did you hear that, Evan?” _She_ – the indirect target of Jim’s _for-customers_ charm, that is; a _MOTHER_ either so young or so cursed in the orthodontic arena that she’s sporting _braces_ on her teeth – is looking directly at Jim despite the question’s obvious intention for the distracted, mousy-haired little boy ( _EVAN_ , as she’s been so keen on repeating at least three times a minute since they first set foot in the store) peering over the counter with his digits hooked over the cheap Formica edge. “This very nice young man asked you if you’d like a bag.”

“Yeah…” Evan manages to get his tiny child fingers around the three-inch Wolverine figurine gorilla glued to the checkout desk, which he promptly yanks at with vigor, to no avail.

“ _Quit that_ , Evan.” Evan’s mother breaks from Jim’s face just long enough to grab hold of her son’s offending hand and clasp it tightly in her own; then, she flashes Jim a smile – a sheepish, coy number meant to convey in as lovely a manner as possible how _sorry_ she is for her son’s misconduct. “He’s in second grade, you know. His teacher keeps telling me he’s not quite at the reading level he should be, so I figure if I can get him something with lots of colorful pictures and interesting action scenes, maybe he’ll actually start reading regularly without me having to get on him all day, every day.”

Jim expected her to do this – offer up unsolicited information about her life on account of how gosh-darned _cute_ he happens to be. It’s something his eyes do to people – Bones and Gaila have mentioned it more than once, affectionately dubbed it ‘ _the Kirk Effect_ ’ – and he’d be as perfectly comfortable with unwittingly abusing it to his advantage as he normally is were it not for the fact that he’s _fifteen_ (i.e.: _definitely_ underage) and not entirely certain whether he’s being flirted with or simply being amiably talked to by this young mother.

Plus – while ringing up that _soon-to-be-Evan’s_ issue of _Guardians of the Galaxy_ , all Jim could think of was the spreads of scantily-clad, sexy green space babe Gamora that doubtlessly laid behind its cover in great number, and the weight of this dramatic irony – the mental picture of Evan and his mother bunking down to read later tonight and being greeted with what could arguably pass for avocado-colored softcore pornography – well, it makes Jim so anxious he almost wants to _laugh_.

He doesn’t, though. Instead, he answers Evan’s mother’s smile with a sunshiny, sparkling one of his own and makes quick work of bagging the young one’s goods. His final move, he’s slowly perfected over the course of the two and a half months he’s spent working here: handing over the primary-colored plastic shopping bag with an arm stretched straight out, consciously crinkling the skin at the corners of his eyes (Gaila, Uhura, and Tyra Banks call it ‘ _smizing_ ’), and saying with every last bit of warmth and enthusiasm he can muster, “There you go! Thanks so much for shopping at Galaxy.”

Of course, Evan’s mother just about falls all over herself with gratitude. “Thank _you!_ ” Swinging Evan – currently clutching onto his bag of brand new comics for dear life and probably a bit too old for treatment like this – up and around to rest against her hip, she gives the boy an encouraging bounce or two, tells him to, “Say ‘ _thank you_ ,’ Evan. Say ‘ _thank you_ ’!”

Evan’s reply is simple and succinct: “I wanna go home.” There’s a low snort from the far right corner of the storeroom, directly in the line of the sun’s joyful beams of destruction.

Unenthusiastic yet acquiescent, Evan’s mother rolls her eyes in a distinctly conspiratorial fashion at Jim, then _winks_ at him – actually _winks_ , Jim has to replay the incident over again in his head about three times before he truly believes it – then makes her way for the tempered glass door with her strange, dazed kid in her arms, talking over her shoulder as she _Exits_. “You have a nice day!”

It takes Jim several flustered beats to raise his hand and his voice in reply. “You, too,” he says, absently waving her off into the sloping, sun-drenched land of Iowa City and wondering just how old the woman really is.

The instant the door swings shut, dull _thud_ the auditory afterthought of whistling door chime, Jim’s unimpressed, intermittently unbearable counterpart makes his presence known.

“Jesus _Christ_ , I was wondering if they’d _ever_ leave. Years from now I’m gonna hear the name ‘ _Evan_ ’ in public and I’ll have a PTSD flashback and _kill_ someone in a manic rage.”

 _GARY MITCHELL_ : the antidote to Jim’s everything bright and shining and so-very sunny. Sometimes, in idle moments spent eyeballing the windows in class or riding shotgun in his mom’s truck, Jim finds himself coming to the recurring conclusion that Gary has just as much uncanny, unexplainable charm as he does (how could he have repeatedly beguiled his way into Jim’s house if he didn’t?), just with none of the warmth.

Jim gives his coworker an amused, slightly squinty look. “That’s not overdramatic or anything.”

“And you’ve _never_ been overdramatic.” Pushing himself off of the shelf of graphic novels on which he’d been leaning, Gary emerges from the wide, burning death strip the sun has paved across the right side of the storeroom and makes his way for the checkout desk, affecting a full-body shudder and an eye-twitch all the while. “Look at me, I’m about to fucking seize over here. You know Mary Hart Syndrome? I think I have _Annoying Customer_ Syndrome. Hurry up and grab the wooden spoon, Jimmy!”

Over the course of Gary’s faintly histrionic tirade, Jim’s attention – wandering puppy dog that it is – finds itself darting back for that woman and her ambiguous behavior. Staring absently off in the general direction of the front door without actually _looking_ at it, Jim registers the moment Gary finally stops making mouth noises and seizes upon the lapse to say, perhaps a bit incongruously, “I think she might have been flirting with me.” Then, realizing the vaguely horrifying implications of that statement, whips his wide eyes back around to Gary and quickly adds, “She couldn’t have been, though, right? I mean, she was an adult and I’m _obviously_ a teenager, right?”

Gary, as usual, is unmoved and over it all. “What makes you think she was an adult?” Slipping the fingers of his left hand into the back pocket of his drainpipe jeans to retrieve his Immortal Beloved (read: his iPhone), the teen twists his lips up into the very faintest of smirks, says, “Did you see those braces? _Hello_ , Teen Mom.”

Jim is reaching across the checkout desk to swipe, _hard_ , at Gary’s bicep – half-crying, half-cackling, “ _Stop!_ ” – when in from the _BACK ROOM_ comes _CHRISTOPHER PIKE_ , carrying two cardboard boxes stacked one atop the other in his leathery arms.

“ _Silly children_ –!” Pike addresses them like that very matter-of-factly and straight-facedly, doesn’t even look directly at them when he does it. “Take these boxes–” He drops said boxes on the cheap carpet in the center of the storeroom. “Open ‘em up, count how many of each book is there, write that number down for me. Sounds good?”

Jim, for his part, wastes no time grabbing a notepad from one of the desk’s many drawers and his much-loved Yoda pen from its marginally ironic home, the _Star Trek_ mug. Gary, on the other hand, mostly gets paid for being a thorn in Pike’s poor, middle-aged side, so –

“Aw, Christopher. That’s so _menial_.” He plays up the whine as far as he’s vocally able, emphasizes it with a hunched back that would give Quasimodo a run for it and a considerably huffy _sigh_. “Don’t you know I need to be intellectually _challenged?_ Why don’t you ever _stimulate me?!_ ”

While Jim has a bit of a time stifling his laughter at all of the gross double entendres one could easily make out of that last statement, Pike fixes Gary with a sharp, deeply unamused look. “Keep talkin’ like that and I’ll have you doing the books and filing taxes.”

In one reasonably unsettling moment, Gary – wonder of wonders – _perks up_ at that. (The discomfort, of course, lies in light of the fact that Jim has never actually seen the boy express an emotion that wasn’t scornful, sarcastic, or severely blunted in some manner.) “You would?” he asks.

Pike’s face wrinkles briefly in confusion, then takes on a shit-eating smile not unlike many of the ones worn by Gary. “Well, if it makes you _that_ happy, I might have to reconsider…”

Jim watches, a little mystified, as employer and employee briefly engage one another in a short bout of fisticuffs – Gary throwing a mock-punch at Pike’s shoulder, Pike tagging Gary first on the upper arm, then on the back of the head with a dull _smack!_ – and despite having worked under Pike alongside Gary for two going on three months now, despite his very real awareness of time’s ability to forge even the unlikeliest of bonds and the fact that Pike has never genuinely _disliked_ Gary, only harbored vast stores of exasperation occasionally bordering on fury for him, it still strikes him as _weird_ – _Bizarro_ weird – for them to be so openly friendly, even playful.

For a moment, it even makes him smile.

“ _Alright, alright, alright_ …” Gary fends off all further blows from Pike with paddling sea lion hands, then goes and plops down on the floor perpendicular to where Jim has situated himself Indian-style in front of the pair of cardboard boxes. Palms up, he wiggles his fingers demonstratively – “Bring it on, Jimmy.”

Methodically, Lieutenants Kirk and Mitchell unload graphic novel after graphic novel onto the cheap carpet – _Stitches_ , _Sons of Anarchy_ , _ElfQuest_ , _The Sandman_ – and tally up each book on the yellow legal pad between them. _7_ , _15_ , _10_ , _20_. _15_ , _30_ , _25_ , _35_. While they work, Jim does some internal math of his own – tallies up thoughts, builds upon ever growing lists of axioms, finds proofs, performs long division.

Last year, Spock – fifteen years-old, can you fucking believe it – filed Sybok’s taxes and got him a refund of over sixteen-hundred dollars.

Last weekend, Gary used the word ‘ _sesquipedalian_ ’ with his eyes closed, the right side of his face pressed into Jim’s pillow, and a slow, slurry voice that belied just how far along he was in his journey towards sleep (that is: _quite far_ ).

At night, Jim sometimes sits just as he’s sitting now in the wicker chair on his front porch or in the yellow grass out by the horse barn and looks for his favorite stars and constellations – the Little Dipper, the North Star, and Cygnus the Swan among them – and occasionally, when he finally locates them, he thinks about his Empire State bestie and feels every emotion on the emotion alphabet – all the way from _A_ ffection to _Z_ eal, all at the same time.

On Friday and Saturday evenings, Jim puts his back against the window above his bed and waits for the inevitable rock to come flying through the air and colliding sharply, audibly with the glass, and when it does – usually every other weekend, usually sometime past nine or ten o’clock – Jim’s heart will vibrate violently in his chest, and he will do his damnedest not to think about why.

He has this super strange notion that he can’t have another friend in his life – there are too many already crammed into the small spaces between his ribs and in the lower registers of his heart, and all of them are so far away, their connections with him so strong and yet so fragile. There’s no more room. And they’re all so _nice_. And time can be so very short. A person can run out of love, you know.

“ _Yo, Chris!_ ” Gary cranes his neck backwards and hangs his head down to just above his shoulder blades, hollers in the direction of Pike’s office door. “We’re done! Can we get back to doing nothing now?”

“No!” Several moments pass before the office door – initially left only very slightly open, as it always is – swings back to let Pike march through the doorway, a roll of striped stickers in his hand. “ _Now_ , you get to do the _really_ fun part…”

  
So Kirk and Mitchell set off to do the _Really Fun Part_ : barcoding all hundred and five graphic novels and hand-writing said barcode numbers down to later be entered into _Galaxy_ ’s online checkout system. Gary groans, Pike laughs maniacally from his evil lair, Jim continues to internally math away – one sticker, one book, one thought at a time.

 

* * *

 

 **Wednesday, March 13, 2013  
** **5:29 PM**

 ** _INT_** _: BREAK ROOM_. The break room is a strange little place. There’s a workplace legend that has made the rounds with employees both current and former, saying that every bit of furniture and every last book, magazine, ugly ass area rug, and questionable piece of wall décor migrated its way to the magical mystery break room from the owner’s own house, thus making said break room a storage unit and/or internal landfill of sorts.

There’s the aforementioned red plaid couch, playing host to a plethora of stains of varying darkness, color, and age and featuring a bordering on _massive_ hole in the fabric of the sofa’s right cushion – a hole that treats unlucky viewers to a sneak peek at the hideous, pockmarked mustard yellow foam that gives the cushion both its shape and its vaguely mildewy smell. The owner has confirmed nearly countless times that the couch has been his ride-or-die since his time as a college freshman in the days of yore, that when he found himself a respectable house, a respectable job, and a respectable wife, he couldn’t quite bear to part with the dreadful thing that had kept him and his bum so happy for so many years, no matter how snidely and how regularly his spouse would bitch at him to. Consequently, the couch gained a new residence in the back room of _Galaxy_ , where it would be used with increasing frequency by kids about as young and immature as the owner was when he and the sofa first became BFFLs.

There’s the battered old traffic light table lamp, which – aside from looking like it belongs more in the bedroom of a five year-old than it does in the eclectic, supposedly adult break room of this here comic shop – has been through the ringer at least six times in its mysterious lifespan, judging from the weird dents all over its shade of ugly orange fiberglass, the what looks like _burn streaks_ on the side of the lamp purposefully facing the wall, and the fact that the lightbulb socket is so old and so fucked, it’s all but _expected_ for the light the flicker on and off when the lamp is in use. Most of the time, the poor thing just stays unplugged – sad green power cord collecting dust under the Pac-Man end table, curled up like an impotent serpent against the wall.

There are the like, thirty _grillion_ books of just about every length and genre one could imagine: picture book classics of early childhood by Maurice Sendak; _Shel_ Goddamn _Silverstein_ ; the ‘ _WORLD B_ ’ in a 1987 edition of _World Book_ ; every Vonnegut save for _Timequake_ ; assorted and moldering issues of _National Geographic_ , _Good Housekeeping_ , _Cosmopolitan_ , and _Kerrang!_ ; _301 Jokes for the Discriminating Buffoon_ and, hilariously, _Philogelos_ (the literal oldest joke book in the world); various home repair manuals; _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ and _The Metamorphosis_ stacked together at the far right end of the bookshelf; _The Great American Songbook_ ; a pocket-sized Bible; the user’s manual for a desktop computer that, mysteriously enough, _isn’t_ the same make and model as the owner’s, but a Compaq DeskPro from 1998; for no discernible reason at all, the fourth edition of the _Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders_ ; a playbill from the original Broadway production of _Jersey Boys_ ; literally _two_ different versions of _The Great Gatsby_ , one of them with about an inch’s worth of scholarly articles and literary criticism tucked in after the actual novel; _Lolita_ ; some Tolstoy, some Dostoyevsky; a stack of arts and crafts and cross-stitching books with a distinctly feminine bent on the floor next to the couch, on the side _without_ the Pac-Man table and the most fucked up lamp known to man; _The Joy of Cooking_ ; and nearly every book at least once considered to be a Great American Novel. Imagine for a moment, dear reader, what the owner’s study at home must look like.

There’s the poster from the 1984 World Fair in New Orleans on the interior side of the door, embellished with an artist’s rendition of the god Poseidon accompanied by two alligators and a bare-breasted mermaid. There are the exactly _four_ Rubik’s cubes, one of them perpetually hidden between the ugly couch’s ugly cushions. There’s the mustard-and-white houndstooth rug and the three foot-tall statue of a scarlet macaw and the three different editions of _Monopoly_ and the television with the VCR on the bottom. There’s the pair of roller skates that haven’t been touched in _decades_.

It is this mystical realm – this oversized time capsule of sorts – that our dear, darling _JIM KIRK_ bursts into on the cusp of half-past five, lilting and purring and crooning in his very best Amy Winehouse apropos of absolutely nothing, “ _Whaaat– kind– of–_ fuckery _is this?_ ”

A frequent occupant of post-college Narnia, _GARY MITCHELL_ raises not his head – that would waste simply _far too_ _much_ energy, energy he can’t afford and plain doesn’t want to squander on matters as trivial and utterly beneath his concern as _interest in other humans_ – but his eyes alone from where they were previously glued to – _you guessed it_ – the screen of his smartphone. He appraises Jim’s impromptu cover with an eloquent, yet perfectly succinct, “ _Gay_ ,” then returns his attention to whatever engrossing things he’d been thumbing at before the musical interjection.

Feeling oddly retaliatory, Jim takes on a moderately less theatrical pose (he’d been standing with his arms spread for the heavens and his feet at least half a yard apart in the wake of his grand entrance) and, narrowing his Disney Princess eyes at his coworker from behind his squarish lenses, says, “You’ve been in here for like half an hour. What have you even been _doing?_ ”

“Shitposting.” Apparently, Gary is feeling taciturn today.

Jim, rather unusually, _isn’t_ as ruffled by this as he would have been a week or even a _day_ before. It’s safe to say he’s getting kind of used to the other’s rough-around-the- _everything_.

“You know–“ He nudges the door of the break room closed behind him as he passes fully into the room, blindly pulling his own phone out of his pocket so that he might check the slew of notifications he’s gotten since the latest rush of customers began. “You could have just waited until your break started. It’s not like Tumblr _needs_ your shitposts to function.”

“That just wouldn’t be like me, though, now would it?” This time, when flicking his hazel gaze over to Jim once more, Gary’s face – instead of being the blank, unreadable slate it is close to eighty percent of the time – carries in it dark, intensely visible shades of mischief and self-satisfied glee that send pop rocks flying around and exploding inside Jim’s thorax, cotton candy forming wispy and sweet and stupidly inexplicable at the very back of his throat.

Jim shows the floor his teeth, shakes his head in the familiar, Gary-provoked rhythm that’s become more and more common over the past few weeks. “Gary Mitchell: slacks off, collects paychecks.”

Gary, in reply, offers up a two-finger salute – to the room in general, to Jim more specifically. “You got it, Jimmy.”

Wednesday – being the universal Hump Day of the Western world – is typically accompanied by levels of midweek exhaustion that aren’t quite unbearable, but certainly aren’t a blast to endure. Accordingly, Jim’s Wednesday afternoon recesses are usually _not_ spent reading his way through all of the books in the break room or playing Solitaire with the deck of Elvis-themed playing cards; instead, they’re filled with the most indolent lazing around possible: sitting on his ass and texting his friends in other states.

> **1-(515)**       
>  bruh have u ever thought abt the fact that the witches in sabrina the teenage witch have a cat named SALEM
> 
> **1-(515)**       
>  thats like a jewish family having a cat named AUSCHWITZ
> 
> **bones**      5:37 PM  
>  I’m BEGGING you to text exactly that to Spock
> 
> **1-(515)**       
>  that on your part is both so antisemitic and so hateful  
>  ….but okay

Thanks to Gary’s insistence on hogging the entire couch every time he finds himself in the break room (which, as you might imagine, is _hella_ often) – lanky legs thrown up and ankles crossed over one of the two armrests, head lolling lazily against the curve of the other – Jim is forced to do all of his texting and lying about on the thin, pear-colored carpet, forced to stretch out on his stomach in the middle of the floor and languidly swing and swivel his feet around in the air like a kid about half his age. Crossing his arms and laying his head upon them while he waits for his phone to vibrate at him once more, he lets his strained, steadily drying eyes fall closed and watches the strange play of light behind their thin lids – golden and strawberry-blond serpents slithering around in a gradually darkening ether, squiggly black cells undergoing mitosis and meiosis at tenth-speed, vague impressions of Bones’ blue iMessage bubbles fading fast in the darkness –

“Are you going to sleep?”

Jim doesn’t open his eyes – in fact, he squints them even more tightly closed, almost as if in protest. “No,” he says, only a little convincingly.

Gary lets the subject lie… for a good minute and a half. Jim is just barely touching his toe-tips to the dark limbic pool behind his forehead when, in typical Gary fashion, his coworker throws a fucking javelin between his eyes: “It looks like you’re going to sleep.”

It’s only because his starts vibrating that Jim opens his eyes this time; glowering half-heartedly and still princess-like at the post-punk spaghetti noodle on the sofa, he says, “You can screw around on Tumblr for an hour and I can’t calmly close my eyes for fifteen minutes?”

“Hey, you’re the responsible one around here.” Gary casts a momentary, impassive glance in Jim’s direction. “Can’t have you flipping the natural order around, ripping the fabric of the space/time continuum and all that.”

Jim, for his part, only has the energy to roll his eyes and yawn out a quick, “ _Whatever_ ,” unlocking his phone and taking in Spock’s reply to his glorified shower thought from earlier.

> **spock**      5:43 PM  
>  You did not lie.
> 
> **spock**      5:44 PM  
>  I’m getting some very serious Strokes vibes in this soup place; lots of grave-faced men in either tweed, cashmere, or leather nodding their heads and tapping their toes, presumably thinking of “last night”…
> 
> **1-(515)**       
>  natrlly i am the man in leather

Gary gives Jim the shock of his life when – in a completely unprecedented display of interest in a life that _a)_ does not belong to him, and _b)_ happens to belong to _Jim_ – he asks him, “Who’re you texting?”

For the first small eternity after the question is out in the air, Jim can only stare, disbelieving, at whatever arbitrary thing is in front of him: the bookshelf – more specifically _Philogelos_ sandwiched between that pretentious book of three-hundred and one jokes and, _hilariously_ , the DSM-IV. The moment that eon ends, however, he finds himself able to form words with his mouth, to ask – with near-comical slowness – “Do you… actually… _care?_ ”

Gary’s answer is as deadpan as it is swift. “No.” A beat, then once again, with no feeling, “Who’re you texting?”

Jim blinks – once at _Philogelos_ ; once, after turning his head, at his crazy fucking sphinx of a coworker. “Spock,” he replies, and almost as if to mock him, his phone vibrates just milliseconds after the answer has left him, heralding in a message from the New York cool kid himself.

> **spock**      5:46 PM  
>  Only if that makes me the man in tweed.

The sphinx gives Jim a nebulous look, then – something that looks like it might be disdainful, like it _should_ be contemptuous in the wake of a blatantly wrong answer and now Gary’s going to strangle Jim with lion’s paws and cackle at his death with a sneering woman’s mouth – but the most it looks to Jim is _slightly unimpressed_ , just as unimpressed as his bronzy, baritone voice sounds when he says, simply, “ _Weirdo_.”

And the assessment isn’t very significant at all to Jim in the moment; later tonight, he might remember it while stretched out on his stomach in bed and wonder briefly what it was all about, wonder if Gary even really _knows_ Spock beyond the admittedly broad overlap in their Tumblr activity – asks sent to and from each other and art dedicated by and for one another and a borderline _embarrassing_ amount of reblogged conversations and screenshots from midnight Skype discussions reaching all the way back from _2010_ , when they first made the jump from LiveJournal to Tumblr – but right now, all the comment registers to Jim is as Gary being the shithead he loves to be, just Gary being annoying, just Gary being _Gary_.

So, due to the atypical, non-anxious mood he’s in today, Jim lets the thing drop for now and crawls his sleepy little butt over to the bookshelf. Grasping the ancient joke book between his perpetually flushed fingers and chuckling tiredly at its cover – a Grecian bust wearing Groucho glasses – he flips through the thick, slightly slippery pages, silently reading and making crumpled paper faces at the absurd, sometimes nonsensical, mostly entirely _unfunny_ jokes contained within until one that strikes him not just as humorous, but straight-up _brutal_ catches his attention. He _yelps_.

“ _A guy with bad breath decides to take his own life, so he wraps his head and asphyxiates himself_.” Jim raises his eyes, mouth ajar in intensely amused disbelief, to where Gary is still sprawled and scrolling on the monstrosity that is the couch. “What is this? Roasting circa _500 AD?_ ”

Gary doesn’t budge an inch – save for his thumb, of course. “What are you talking about?”

“This is a joke book from Ancient Greece, and this guy–” Jim pauses to read the author – correction, _authors_ – off of the front of the book. “These guys _Hierokles_ and _Philagrios_ aren’t kidding around with the insults.”

Gary shocks the shit out of Jim a _second_ time when, instead of firing back something insolent and unquestioningly abusive, he orders him to, “Read me another one.” He still isn’t looking at Jim, still isn’t obviously doing anything but wreaking havoc on Tumblr with his thumb and his twisted, vile brain alone, but he’s _interested_ – and that’s as weirdly _nice_ as it is rare and thoroughly disconcerting.

Jim, just bewildered enough to skip the whole _staring off into space with a distinctly puzzled expression_ phase and jump right into the task at hand, skims through the book in his hands with hawklike, maybe even slightly desperate intensity – especially after Gary, the bastard, interjects with a not very irritable, completely assholish, “Tick-tock, dude, before I get bored.” Once he finds a joke he’s certain will at least just barely tickle Gary’s blackened, reinforced steel-plated funny bone, he all but blurts it out: “ _Consulting a hotheaded doctor, a fellow says, 'Professor, I'm unable to lie down or stand up; I can't even sit down.' The doctor responds: 'I guess the only thing left is to hang yourself.'_ "

There’s a hysterically scary moment when Gary doesn’t respond at all – absolutely no movement in any of his limbs or facial features from his end. The moment immediately following, however, turns out to be even _scarier_ , because Gary fucking _laughs_.

Now, I’m sure you’re thinking, dear reader, that Gary Mitchell, being a person on this planet called Earth, is _of course_ quite capable of laughter. You might even be musing to yourself that Jim, having known Gary for two and a half months now, _must_ have witnessed him laugh at least _once_ before, and you’d be totally right if you were – Jim _has_ seen him laugh, _has_ heard his snide snickering and derisive little snorts and, in moderately rarer instances of hilarity, has even seen his face split in momentary amusement at things entirely absurd and childish, strange and faintly disturbing grins and crinkling eye-corners in the near-total darkness of his bedroom at night while they’ve watched stupid children’s programming on Netflix and crawled ever closer to sleep.

He’s never seen _this_ before, though – Gary with his head thrown back as far as it’s able to be thrown while propped against the red plaid armrest, mouth _wide_ _fucking open_ and letting out a steady stream of chesty, throaty bona fide _laughter_ – not chuckling, not sniggering – but honest to God, rhythmic up-and-down, big vocal pockets of happiness kind of _laughter_ – and in some faraway, not wholly conscious corner of his mind, it frightens and satisfies him in equal measure to think that Hellenic humor may be the height of comedy for this strange boy that wormed his way into his life in the most bizarre, most unceremonious way possible –

And all of a sudden, it occurs to him that Gary Mitchell is a human being.

That’s enough to make him burst with laughter, too – hard enough for his head to hurt and his stomach to creak in protest.

Both boys are carrying on like this when the break room’s door swings open and in comes _CHRISTOPHER PIKE_ , almost instantaneously taken aback by the display of mutual mirth, given the puzzled look on his face.

“What’n the hell happened?” the man asks, comically alarmed at the prospect that both Kirk _and_ Mitchell – one of the Good Lord’s cherubs and a minor demon from Hell, as far as he’s concerned – could find something funny enough to laugh about together.

Jim and Gary taper momentarily off in their laughter to share a brief, conspiratorial, completely accidental look – upon which they can only devolve into yet another shared fit of vocalized glee. Pike leaves them there like that shaking his sad salt-and-pepper head in disbelief, and when Jim finally composes himself enough to get up off the floor and get his ass back to work, he does so shaking his own head, too, and texting Spock –

> **1-(515)**       
>  omfg spock guess what
> 
> **1-(515)**       
>  gary… is an actual human being

 

* * *

 

 **Thursday, March 14, 2013  
** **6:14 PM**

 ** _EXT_** _: GALAXY COMICS_. Located at the far right end of a strip mall near the outskirts of downtown Iowa City, the brick-walled complex is small, unassuming when both figuratively and literally tucked in the corner of the coffeeshops and clothing boutiques it happens to share a lot with – coffeshops and clothing boutiques that are so much more ostentatious, so much more attractive, and so much more obviously _meant_ for hip and aspiring-to-hip college students and high school seniors chomping at the bit of their impending independence. Its single exterior draw comes in the form of the massive, 80s-licious neon sign hung above the glass-paneled front door – broadcasting _GALAXY COMICS_ in red, yellow, and blue to the whole goddamn world and accentuated thoughtfully with star sparkles and a primary-colored rocket ship.

Along the russet stone side of _Galaxy_ is a gray strip of pavement illuminated in the evenings only by a single cast iron lamppost with a warm yellow bulb. Right now, it’s about an hour too early for that bulb to be shining, so _GARY MITCHELL_ stands propped up against the brick wall in the growing mauve darkness unlit and unyellow, smoking a withering Marlboro Menthol.

 _JIM KIRK_ – our intrepid hero – has ventured outside under the pretense of ‘ _needing to get some fresh air_ ’; he told this to his middle-aged supervisor and the man ate it right up, himself an avid connoisseur of the Great OutdoorsTM. In all honestly, though, it’s not fresh air that Jim seeks – it’s quite the opposite, in fact. It’s the bitter, acrid air forming in translucent clouds around Gary that he’s looking for, for reasons he’s been chewing through like Fruit Roll-Ups since last night.

Truth be told, yesterday marked the beginning of a breakthrough of sorts in Jim’s fast-track, intensely colorful little mind. For the past almost-three months, he’s been slowly acclimating himself to the special H-bomb that is Gary and his inexplicable presence of his life – not really thinking about it, just sort of letting it happen like a trainwreck in slow motion, a VCR eating magnetic tape. He’s been getting used to the constant snark at work and the random home invasions during the weekends, been unconsciously cataloguing personal factoids about the other: his status as a native New Orleanian and the strange accent it gives him when he’s careless or sleepy; his uncanny fascination with children’s television shows; the sometimes oxymoronic dichotomy between his online persona and his actual personality (which, while similar, are distinct and eerily difficult to qualify); and, most bizarre of them all, the fact that he’s repeatedly _put_ _himself_ in Jim’s proximity for absolutely _no apparent reason_. Until yesterday afternoon’s episode in the _BREAK ROOM_ , this is all Gary has been to Jim: just an arbitrary collection of attributes with nothing tangible, dynamic, or _real_ underneath.

 _Ce n'est pas comme ça_ anymore.

Jim is all but assaulted with the harsh smell of cigarette smoke once he rounds the corner from the front to the side of _Galaxy_ ; mouth moving faster than his head can feasibly catch up with it, he blurts out, “I can’t believe Pike lets you get away with smoking during your shift.”

Translucent gray dragon snaking from his mouth in thick, smoky coils, Gary is as quick to retort as he always is. “I can’t believe your mom let you get away with walking out of the house wearing _those shorts_ this morning.”

Jim takes a moment to look down at himself – take in the _Galaxy_ t-shirt and the cutoff denim shorts he’s wearing – then, pouting just so, protests, “Cutoffs are totally hip!”

“I guess they would be if you were farmer trash.”

The barb is well-aimed enough to sting Jim into forgetting why he came out here in the first place. It should be known that the boy has, well, a bit of a _thing_ about being from such a boring, remote, and utterly unremarkable town such as _Riverside_ ; while it certainly cements the whole uncanny, ridiculous connection he has to his Starfleet captain counterpart in the grander scheme of things, it also puts him miles away from anything groovy and current and _real_ happening in the world (i.e.: in Iowa City, in Cedar Rapids, and in Des Moines) and classifies him rather solidly as a _bumpkin_ of monumental proportions. Just another thing to make him so different from Gary, with all his _coolness_.

But then – in totally Bizarro fashion – Gary pulls the cigarette from his lips and wags it in Jim’s direction, says, noncommittal as anything, “You wanna hit?”

And just like that – at the slightest whiff of acceptance – Jim forgets all about forgetting.

Closing the distance between where he stands at the very end of the wall and where Gary is loitering near the middle, Jim – by his nature quite impulsive, if there were any doubts on the matter – takes the offered cigarette from between Gary’s fore- and middle fingers with his own index and thumb and holds it before his lips, transfixed and a touch unsure. All it takes is Gary’s offhand instruction, though – “Don’t inhale.” – and then Jim is placing the yellow-orange filter of the cigarette between his lips and letting smoke and heat collect along the roof of his mouth, along the base of his tongue, in the very back of his throat, where it’s goddamn fucking _awful_ –

“Holy _shit!_ ” He’s coughing – desperate, hacking wheezes and dry heaves while doubled over and holding Gary’s cigarette as far away from himself as he can – and somewhere beyond the distinct sounds of him and his soul _dying_ a tarry, tobacco-filled death in some horrible hell furnace, he can hear Gary cackling like the shit he is and feel him snatching the cigarette out of his trembling left hand. With literal _tears_ welling up in his eyes, Jim raises his head to squint, utterly incredulous, at the evil thing snickering above him and painstakingly croak out between bodily coughs and the occasional retch, “How– the hell– do you– smoke that? It’s– disgusting!”

“Haven’t you heard?” Gary’s mouth – so rarely indicative of any emotion yet so intensely expressive when it is – stretches into a smug grin that feels to Jim so much like a pleasant punch in the face. “I’m undead.”

In the midst of his slow and painful death, Jim – the poor baby – finds it in himself to be playful. “I guess you would be,” he rasps, “If you smoked that demon shit.”

In a moment that’s scarily like the one they shared the day before, the two of them exchange near-identical looks of self-satisfaction and almost childlike amusement. Honestly? It’s kind of nice.

There’s a question Jim’s been dying to ask Gary since his two-AM epiphany this morning – dying enough to text it him as soon as it occurred to him, had his thumbs and his social anxiety not backspaced through it in iMessage before he could hit the _Send_ button – but because he’s not quite brave enough yet to give voice to the part of him that agonizes over meaning and classification and arbitrary boundaries, instead of asking Gary something serious, he goes with something infinitely less so and says, “You wanna hear a thought I had yesterday?”

Gary flicks the ash off his cigarette, watches disinterestedly as the gray tumbles against the pavement. “Shoot.”

“You know how the family in Sabrina the Teenage Witch has a cat named Salem?” Jim all but forces himself not to look away or flinch when Gary up and looks him directly in the face mid-sentence, raising his cigarette to his lips, burning cherry glowing angry red – he _wills_ himself to keep on trucking. “That would be like a Jewish family having a cat and naming it Auschwitz.”

A borderline _horrifying_ look comes over Gary’s face then – gravely solemn and, dare Jim thinks it, perhaps even a little _hurt_ (which, to the surprise of maybe no one, is an expression Jim had never even _dreamed_ of seeing on the other’s face, being that up until yesterday it seemed as though he’d had no real feelings to hurt _at all_ ) – and Jim feels it like a cold kick in the gut when in the grimmest and most offended tone of voice possible, Gary says to him, “I’m Jewish, Jim. That’s _really_ fucking offensive.”

For one long, unbearable, screaming fucking _terrifying_ moment, Jim’s face is the color of a roma tomato and the only noises capable of coming out of him are some permutation of ‘ _uhm_ ’, ‘ _oh my God_ ’, ‘ _shit_ ’, and ‘ _I’m sorry_ ’, and Gary lets him fester in it for a good little while, stares him down with cool and unforgiving eyes and sucks on the butt of his cigarette for a whopping _thirty seconds_ before, without a warning of any sort, bursting into distinctly hyena-esque laughter and cawing like the schadenfreude-loving crow he is – “I’m just fucking with you, man, that was funny as hell.”

Jim, still quite cherry-hued, fixes Gary with a Look to end all looks. “You’re not serious.”

“Oh _yeah_ I am.” Coughing-hacking-cackling smoke in obnoxious canine spurts, Gary grins right in Jim’s blushing, freckled face with real moisture at the corners of his eyes, sobering momentarily only to add, “Well, I _am_ Jewish, but still.” Another quick, crazy burst of laughter. “I’mma be laughing about that shit for _weeks_.” Shaking his head, snickering wildly – “A cat named _Auschwitz_ , holy _fuck_.”

“You’re really Jewish?” Jim – quite possibly delirious with shock and strangely unfeverish outrage – feels like he might actually be going insane.

“As a klezmer violin.” Gary is still smirking when he sticks his shrinking cigarette back between his faintly chapped lips, drawling in the most exaggeratedly Yiddish accent he can muster around the butt of it – “ _Ess dreck, boychick_.”

And really, Jim – a mostly accidental connoisseur of bizarre experiences – could not imagine anything stranger than Gary Mitchell – olive-skinned, foul-mouthed, New Orleanian jackass extraordinaire – being a Jew who busts a gut at low-key Holocaust jokes. The week just keeps getting weirder and weirder.

“Does it?” Looking up to find Gary’s darkly pleased, lightly questioning eyes on his face and his question hanging hazily in the air, Jim belatedly realizes that he’s vocalized the sentiment and promptly swallows all of the spit in his mouth. He feels abruptly brave.

“Are we _friends?_ ” Though most of the redness has seeped from his face by now, rosiness collects with newfound fervor in the tips of Jim’s ears as soon as it occurs to him what the _hell_ just came out of his mouth (and with what candidness, too!), and his mouth just _can’t_ close, _can’t_ let the inquiry just stand there by itself – “I mean, I know you come to my house sometimes and spell weird shit like ‘ _fecal h-g-mony_ ’ on my fridge with the alphabet magnets, and we did meth a couple of weeks ago and that was weird and nice, yeah, and apparently you want to marry like all of my cats and you leave a crazy fucking message in my askbox like, _every other day_ , but you’re like – _weird_ , and _mean_ , and you talk shit about me to my face all the time and hang out with cool skater kids, so I don’t know if _you_ think we’re friends or if I’m just reading into things that aren’t actually there and you just like having me around as like, your weird whipping board or someth–”

“Is this what it sounds like to be in your head?” Gary exhales smoke out of the side of his mouth, and he’s wearing another new expression Jim has never seen before – something caught at the intersection of amusement and utter mystification. He snorts, sardonic – “’Cause if so, _yikes_ , dude.”

Jim, in spite of everything that might make him feel hurt or wounded by the statement, finds that for the most part, all he feels is a peculiar agreement. “It kind of sucks, yeah,” he hears himself say.

For a disconcertingly lengthy amount of time after that – after Jim’s timid acknowledgement, after the murmur of a smirk Gary gives him in reply – they don’t speak. Jim simply leans against the brick-walled side of _Galaxy_ with his shoulders pulled forward and his hands pushed deep into his shorts’ denim pockets, and Gary simply smokes his cigarette down to an impotent yellow-orange stub, heel of his combat boots digging into the masonry behind him and silken chocolate hair dancing gently around his head in the early evening breeze. The silence between them stretches and stretches until it’s a static, fuzzy pull of flavorless taffy – soothing without being comfortable, deafening without making noise – and Jim is somewhere on the edge of thinking that it’ll never end and that the two of them will stand here against _Galaxy Comics_ , wordless and teenaged and just barely touching each other, until the end of time itself when Gary drops his finished cigarette to the ground, grinds it out with the toe of his right boot, and _says_ something.

“I don’t like the word ‘ _friend_ ’.” He doesn’t look at Jim when he says this, though Jim looks at him as though he’s been holding all of the answers to the universe and more and he _finally_ decided to share them with him. “It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me – I’ve never really had ‘ _friends_ ’, anyway.”

It shocks Jim like an electric current when the very first thing he thinks in that moment is ‘ _me too_ ’, and then – much louder, and so very much sadder – ‘ _are you lonely? are you alone like me?_ ’.

“I _do_ like watching Netflix, though. Sometimes with other people. I like when people laugh at the stupid shit I say. I like sleeping in beds that aren’t mine.” Gary stops staring at whatever vague thing in the middle distance he’d been focusing his attention on, turns his head to look at Jim – not super solemnly, but with nothing devious or dark coloring his expression for once. “I like it when I find someone who isn’t totally fucking _boring_.”

Jim blinks. “People aren’t boring.”

“They _kind of are_ , though.” For an instant so quick it’s almost imperceptible, something bright and happy and knowing flits across Gary’s face – but then it’s gone, and he’s back to just looking at Jim, saying, “ _You_ aren’t.”

And Jim doesn’t know what that means. He’s never experienced the kind of unchallenged, unstimulated, severely underfed genius and almost genetic adoration for the world that Gary has, the kind of overwhelming, all-consuming exhaustion they naturally give way to when confronted with inanity, with unthinking Americanism, with complacency, with eyeless parenting. Jim is smart as a whip and perceptive as ever, but one thing he’s never been lacking in from both the inside and the out is this terrifyingly large, heart-bursting sort of _love_ – love that might hurt and beat and scream at you for your mistakes, love that might leave you without warning in uncontrollable freak accidents, love you might have to boot up with your computer and your Internet modem and an instant messaging/video call program that shits out almost too much to even be worth using, love that is so real and so essential to your soul that a lack of it would mean almost certain death; he was _born_ and has _lived_ in a _Pacific Oceanful_ of that kind of love. He’s never been driven to apathy. He’s never had to lose himself in offensive jokes and intentionally provocative, occasionally disaffected behavior to feel something. He’s never looked at another person and felt nothing but bitter resignation. He’s been luckier.

What Jim _does_ know, though, is that there’s something so special about being _special_ ; something even _more_ special about _finding_ someone _else_ who’s special, who’s new, who’s unique. He felt it when he first met Bones; he felt it when he first met Spock; he felt it meeting every last member of his multitalented, transcontinental bridge crew of displaced sci-fi characters.

He might have even felt it the night he looked out of his window in February and found Gary standing a story below him in the dark, bitching at him to open the front door.

So he smiles and says, “Thanks.”

Gary smiles back, smiles a smile Jim can’t find even the slightest trace of malice in, but he doesn’t let the moment last longer than only a second or so before he’s pushing himself off the brick wall and making back for _Galaxy_ ’s front door, saying – “I can just hear Pike’s crabby ass now. ‘ _When you two queers are done jacking each other off out there, maybe you’d like to get yer asses back to work!_ ’”

Jim laughs openly, falls in step beside Gary. “Pike wouldn’t make a gay joke.”

“ _All_ middle-aged white men make gay jokes, James,” Gary retorts, saying it to Jim as if he were a very small child in need of _so much_ educating about the world. “It’s just a matter of catching them in the right place, at the right time.”

Jim’s mother pulls up to _Galaxy_ in her huge, ugly truck not a full fifteen minutes later. Before he leaves, Jim smiles at Gary for the first time while bidding the other farewell.

“It’s my birthday next Friday.” He doesn’t know why he tells him, doesn’t know anything but the weird and wonderful happiness zinging inside him like popcorn kernels. “Send me something extra weird then, okay?”

Gary, true to form, only crosses his eyes at him in response. Jim laughs all the way home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> something in me is concerned that gary doesn't come off as quite as much of a shithead as he should due to my efforts towards multidimensionality and the fact that i'm actually kind of a creampuff by nature; if you have any love in your heart, let me know your thoughts.
> 
> just a quick trivia: the song playing in _galaxy _in the first section of the chapter is intended to be 'band on the run' by paul mccartney and wings (although honestly, it could be any paul mccartney song you wanted).__
> 
> __comments, critiques, and questions are heavily encouraged and heartily welcomed._ _
> 
> __\- gabi_ _

**Author's Note:**

>  **me** : rameseas.tumblr.com (yes, i am using jim's url, sue me) or theatrhythms@gmail.com  
>  **art for this fic/verse** : ffoxart.tumblr.com/tagged/escape  
>  **inspo blog for this fic/verse** : and-escape.tumblr.com
> 
> don't be a stranger!


End file.
